Canadian research finds climate change could lead to extinction of bumblebees
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Bumblebees are disappearing at rates “consistent with a mass extinction” thanks largely to climate change, according to a new study in Canada.
Researchers at the University of Ottawa say they have developed a technique for predicting the impact of climate change on species’ extinction risk, with bees at the forefront of their research.
University of Ottawa researchers looked at data from bumblebees over a 115-year period.
The study linked “climate chaos” to extinctions and one author said the world was in the thick of its sixth mass extinction event — the biggest since the dinosaurs.
The study found that the likelihood of bumblebees surviving in any given place has declined by 30 per cent over the course of a human generation.
The importance of bees as the world’s best pollinators is well-known, particularly for widely used crops like “like tomato, squash, and berries”, and major declines would lead to less biodiversity.
Increased frequency of heatwaves, droughts and other extreme events caused by climate change were at the centre of the research, with observed on 66 bumblebee species over 115 years, from 1900 to 2015.
