Wild Clocks
February 04, 2025 at 01:02AMWild clocks, the seasonal cues that animals, plants, and insects use to orchestrate their existence, are shifting due to global warming caused by climate change. Where once was greater predictability in the timing of spring warmth and fall chill, the delicate balances that govern food sources, hibernation, and mating, are slowly shifting with unforeseeable consequences. According to David Farrier, “wild clocks don’t tick with the steady pulse of a Swiss watch, they swing. Assembled together, they form a vast polyrhythmic score, an impossibly complex arrangement of syncopated beats and pulses, tempo layered upon tempo, in a rich, immersive cross-rhythm that drives life forwards day by day, year by year, season to season.”
Biological clocks that evolved an exact synchronization over millions of years are falling out of sync: the beat does not fall where it should; syncopation becomes dissonance. Failing wild clocks are resulting in misalignments in time between predators and prey, herbivores and plants, or flowers and pollinators. The results can be catastrophic, as breeding seasons fail and the long-held relationships that weave species together around shared needs fray.
In Greenland, the caribou breeding season is precisely synchronized with the arrival of spring. Both calving and plant phenology are advancing as the climate warms, but at different speeds. Whereas calves are born, on average, just under four days earlier than thirty years ago, the plant-growing season has advanced by nearly five days. That single day’s difference may not sound much, but for outliers within the range the risk that calves will starve is real and growing starker with each year as the gap widens. Reindeer in the north of Norway face similar pressures. During winter they rely mainly on mosses for sustenance, but in warm winters, when snowfall is punctuated by rain, ice can form impenetrable layers in the snowpack.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/03/wild-clocks/
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