The Sinai baton blue butterfly, with a wingspan no wider than a thumbnail, may seem like an insignificant creature. It lives only on mountainside patches of wild thyme in an arid corner of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt called Saint Katherine's Protectorate. But a pair of British scientists think it may be the perfect model for how vulnerable animals will go extinct in the face of rising temperatures.
Plants and animals will not dwindle away slowly, say mathematical ecologist Martin Hoyle and biologist Mike James, formerly of the University of Nottingham in England. Instead, they will abruptly wink out of existence when temperatures reach tipping points. They used the butterfly—one of the world's smallest—to test how global warming and other pressures like livestock grazing might cause animal species to go extinct. They projected that small amounts of habitat loss or warming temperatures would have little effect. Even if goats ate ...
