Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid by Thor Hanson: A Review
Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change by Thor Hanson
PUBLISHERS: Basic Books
ISBN-13: 9781541672420
ON SALE: September 28th 2021
PAGE COUNT: 304
The joy of receiving an ARC of an upcoming Thor Hanson book has been one of the happiest moments of 2021 for me. His previous books on seeds, feathers, and bees rekindled my interest in plant biology from my undergraduate days and a specific interest in honeybees. The upcoming book is an account of the biological factors that come into play concerning climate change.
The book has four parts discussing a) culprits, b) challenges, c) responses, and d) results of global warming and its effects on the ecosystem. A cursory glance through studies on evolution from a historical standpoint, the formulation of the idea of “punctuated equilibrium” which tells us that evolutionary change occurs in sudden and rapid bursts followed by long periods of stability, and 18th and 19th-century studies on the nature of carbon dioxide by chemists like Arrhenius, Priestley, and Tyndall comprise the short first part as an introduction into the causative agents of increasing temperatures. In Hanson’s usual style, these chapters have his own experiments sometimes carried out with his son Noah and add a touch of relatability to the reader.
I was intrigued to learn about Henry David Thoreau’s data on the flora and fauna around Walden Pond which makes for a time capsule of phenology (the study of seasonal changes). This data is being used to compare with modern flowering and nesting observations for changing climate. Hanson’s books always inspire you to think about your neighbourhood and observe the nature around you more closely. And just like in the Walden Pond, an Alstonia tree outside my window has been blooming early in the autumn because of warming seasons. These early flowering species confuse the pollinators (birds and bees) who come late in the season to find the end of blooming. Such a phenomenon is called “time mismatches” by biologists. On the other hand, high temperatures are shifting organisms from their feeding grounds gradually sometimes causing overlap of species in a particular zone. Throughout these disadvantageous situations, organisms show tendencies to adapt and find new ways to be resilient until they can’t do it anymore. That’s when populations start dropping dead. Just check out the case of the mountain pine beetles in North America chomping their way northward due to warm winters and leaving behind dead timber in their wake.
The problem is multifactorial as often a biological problem is. Warmer temperatures, in summary, are narrowing habitat overlap, increasing threats of predation, microbes, and parasites, and declining specialist organisms while opportunists struggle to survive.
So what are animals and plants doing currently as temperatures increase? They are responding by moving, adapting, evolving, and taking refuge. This constitutes the third part of the book and the most interesting of all. Here’s a statistic to consider. All over the world between 25–85% of all species are in the process of relocating as a result of climate change. Sound familiar? Humans are on the move too. Hanson provides a tiny remark towards the end of the book about how humans responded to the Little Ice Age and it resulted in human migration due to economic adversity. Though it was a long spell of freezing temperatures it was a drastic climate change that had a domino effect on the socio-economic makeup of the 17th-century world. For a delightful study pick up Global Crisis by Geoffrey Parker.
A team of scientists in 2017 had an opportunity to study lizard populations in the Caribbean and note their behaviour following Hurricane Irma and Maria. The team used leaf-blowers to test how lizards held onto surfaces at various wind speeds. Ingenious experiment for an ingenious trait evolved on islands prone to hurricanes. The result showed lizards that survived the hurricane had larger sticky toepads and longer forelimbs to hold onto branches than the lizards observed before the hurricane. The traits for holding onto branches firmly were selected. A massively popular scientific finding brought hundreds of viewers online to see the lizards in action. The finding was published in Nature titled Hurricane-induced selection on the morphology of an island lizard. Natural selection at work within a few generations can be reversible too in which case the traits might disappear and reappear according to the needs.
The final part of the book discusses the unpredictability of climate change models and how despite that artificial intelligence is helping in predicting habitat and range shifts of particular animals. Hanson writes about ways that paleobotany, paleogeography, and study of ice cores in polar caps provide a glimpse into the mass extinctions that occurred in the past and what can be learned from them. The author presses on a crucial point that past events have shown rapid climate change coupled with environmental stressors amplified in mass extinctions in certain cases and others only modest adaptations by species. The future of climate change science is exciting and full of possibilities. How changing climate patterns cause genetic drifts is yet to be explored on a massive scale so merry things for upcoming undergrads in universities. So where does this leave the reader? Doing every bit you can to be mindful of the changes around you. That is where the book concludes.
The book is not at par with the previous books by Hanson but certainly provides compact information about how species react to their changing surroundings and the latest research concerning it. A valuable bibliography section at the end and numerous references are helpful for biologists but might leave the non-specialist reader wanting a bit more.
