Photo: Thomas Naef, 2022
As insect populations decrease worldwide in what some have called an “insect apocalypse,” biologists are desperate to determine how the six-legged creatures are responding to a warming world and to predict the long-term winners and losers.
A new study of Colorado grasshoppers shows that, while the answers are complicated, biologists have much of the knowledge they need to make these predictions and prepare for the consequences.
The findings, published Jan. 30 in the journal PLOS Biology, come thanks to the serendipitous discovery of 13,000 grasshoppers all collected from the same Colorado mountain site between 1958 and 1960 by a biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). After that scientist’s untimely death in 1973, the collection was rescued by his son and donated to the CU Museum, where it languished until 2005, when César Nufio, then a postdoctoral fellow, rediscovered it. Nufio set about curating the collection and initiated a resurvey of the same sites to collect more grasshoppers.
The newly collected insects allowed Nufio and his colleagues — Caroline Williams of the University of California, Berkeley, Lauren Buckley of the University of Washington in Seattle and postdoctoral fellow Monica Sheffer, who has an appointment at both institutions — to assess the impact of climate change over the past 65 years on the sizes of six species of grasshopper. Because insects are cold-blooded and don’t generate their own heat, their body temperatures and rates of development and growth are more sensitive to warming in the environment.