Species of the near future, like a new sweater you accidentally put through a tumble-dry cycle, may be smaller and less useful than you remember them. Organisms from polar bears to plants to farmed fish are already losing stature. As the world gets hotter and rainfall gets more sporadic, countless other species are expected to shrink, too--provided they don't disappear altogether.
The authors of a new paper in Nature Climate Change compiled data from dozens of studies on species size and climate change. They had reason to expect that many species would be shrinking in response to global warming. Animals and plants have already been observed breeding earlier, flowering sooner, and gradually shifting their ranges toward the poles (and cooler temperatures). Additionally, the fossil record tells us that invertebrates and small mammals shrank during ancient periods of warming. On those occasions, though, the thermostat was turned up gradually--nothing like today.
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