Climate Change Messing with Mother Nature’s Timetable

In nature, timing is everything.

From the mass migration of monarch butterflies to the simultaneous seminal release of corals to the collective deaths of salmon and cicadas, many species stick to schedules so strict, their habits could be used to mark the seasons.

Unfortunately, more and more evidence suggests that climate change has already begun to cuss up these timetables.

Some flowers, for example, seem to be adapting more quickly to global warming than the wild bumblebees they rely on for reproduction.  The flowers bloom earlier, often before the bees have emerged to transport pollen between them.  As a result, the plants produce fewer seeds.  If the two can’t sync up, the lockstep dance of pollination that has developed over millennia may unravel over the relatively short course of centuries — or even decades.

Scientists call this occurrence a “phenological mismatch,” but you could simply think of it as bad timing. 

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