Jeff Goldblum may have only been pretending to be a scientist (and talking about fictional dinosaurs), but he kind of hit the nail on the head with that famous quote.
The more we learn, the more we’re in awe of the solutions animals and plants find for the many challenges that come with living on this big blue planet.
This is particularly important in an era of rapid environmental changes induced by human activities. How will organisms respond to projected future environmental conditions? What are their solutions to cope with major threats such as climate change? In principle, we know they can respond in at least three ways: organisms can take flight (through migration), fight (adjusting their biology through acclimatisation and/or adaptation) or they can die.
All of these potential responses are conditioned by, perhaps, one of the most important characteristics of nature, the existence of variation.
We can see variation in the biological features of organisms, called ‘phenotypes’ or ‘traits’, and we can feel variation in the physical factors of their environments.
The coupling between these two components of nature — phenotype and environment — has driven the evolution and diversification of life on earth during the last 3.5 billion years.
Read the CSIRO blog by Dr Juan Diego Gaitan-Espitia - “Populations, and not entire species, might be the key to adapting to climate change.”
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