Vijay Garg
In our ecosystem, all living things follow a process called natural selection. It is this process that determines which genes are most beneficial for the survival of life and produces “improvements” in adaptation.
Climate change and its catastrophic effects on the entire world can also affect this process of natural selection, due to the modification of various evolutionary processes of living things.
To fully understand how climate change affects natural selection, we need to know what it is all about. Natural selection is the process by which a species adapts to its environment. Evolutionary mutations occur when individuals with certain traits have higher survival or fertility rates than other individuals in the population, and these inherited genetic traits are passed on to their offspring.
A genotype is a group of organisms that share a particular genetic group. Therefore, to put it bluntly, natural selection is a consistent difference in survival and reproduction between different genotypes. This is what we might call reproductive success.
Natural selection and climate change
A study published in the journal Science last week found that global changes in this process of natural selection are driven more by rain than by temperature. As climate change alters rainfall management on a global scale, it can also affect this natural selection process.
Although the environmental consequences of climate change are increasingly being well documented, the effects of climate on the development process that guide adaptation are unknown.
Increased rainfall and drought
One change that could affect natural selection is the rain regime. If they decrease, droughts increase, in time and consistency. Then, due to the increase in drought, many areas became dry and even desert. However, in other areas, rainfall is increasing and there may be cases in which this area becomes more humid.
In any case, it affects the pattern of natural selection. That is, the evolution of different species of organisms is affected because not only do the genes of the species change, but so do the external agents (climate). Climate variations, such as temperature rise, wind regime, rainfall, etc. They affect changes that can occur as a result of natural selection processes in different organisms.
Changes in the ecosystem
There may be long-term changes in the ecosystem that may have a “margin” to adapt to different species and learn to survive in the face of new scenarios.
For example, changes in rainfall patterns can affect the food resources of different organisms. That is, species that depend on certain nutrients, such as herbs, may be affected by a decrease in plant cover due to a decrease in rainfall.
That is why it is so important to know the effects of climate change and its relationship to the evolutionary processes of natural selection in order to understand the changes in the functioning of the ecosystem. Due to the fact that heavy rainfall is expected to increase in a short period of time which could lead to significant changes in the selection pattern.
As I mentioned earlier, depending on the speed at which changes occur in the ecosystem, species may or may not adapt to new conditions.
However, there is no denying that climate change is likely to change the adaptation of living things around the world. |
