The bodies of salamanders living in North America are 8% smaller since 1960. Some animals are shrinking, and that’s not a good thing.
The whole issue closely resembles the plot of a movie. The film is from 2017, the title is Downsizing, and the director is Alexander Payne.
Downsizing is about a sui generis experiment, but for good: a scientist reduces his own mass and that of participants in an experiment to a body volume equal to 1/2744 of the original. The purpose? To save the planet: the total of all the non-compostable products produced by the entire community of participants in the experiment could in fact be contained in a single bag of garbage.
With what has been observed by scientists who study animals, there are substantial differences and some surprising points of contact. The latter include, for example, the aspect of impact on the environment and the issue of global warming. One big difference, of course, is that in one case it’s fiction, in another it’s reality.
It may seem redundant to point this out but, given that you almost don’t believe it, it’s good to make it clear that, yes, it’s really happening: birds, mammals and fish are shrinking. That’s not good news.
Which animals are getting smaller
Scholars have observed that in the Appalachians, a mountain range located in eastern North America, the bodies of salamanders are 8 percent smaller since 1960. In the Atlantic Ocean, maenad fish are getting lighter – by an average of 15 percent – than they were in 1987, while the mass of birds at the Field Museum in Chicago is 4 percent lower since records began in the 1970s.
Why the animals are shrinking
And here’s the bad news: the shrinking of animals is most likely linked to rising temperatures caused by climate change. The principle is that smaller bodies make it easier for warm-blooded animals to stay cool – a matter of survival. And a matter of biology: the heat in fact blocks the metabolism of these little creatures, thus halting their growth.
The observation of animals never ceases to amaze. In fact, it is incredible how species different from man are able to get around the limits inherent to our condition.
There is, for example, the German ant that never ages, nor works, and yet is strangely well liked by all the other colleagues. And what about the immortal jellyfish, the longest-lived animal in the world?
Giuseppe Giordano