Join your hosts Sammi Shimota and Giselle Ray, along with guest Frankie Garland as we discuss how climate change is altering the snowshoe hare's habitat from the paper "Camouflage mismatch in seasonal coat color due to decreased snow duration" by L. Scott Mills, Marketa Zimova, Jared Oyler, Steven Running, John T. Abatzoglou, and Paul M. Lukacs, Published in PNAS. We also discuss some findings from the paper "Geographic variations in winter adaptations of snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) by L.C. Giloitti, D.R. Diefenbach, and M.J. Sheriff. Special thanks to Dr. Marketa ZImova for answering some of our questions about molting!

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Terminology discussed:

-Phenology: “the timing of events during the year, in environments where seasonal changes occur” Some examples include the timing of hibernation and mating.

-Phenotype: observable traits of an individual. Examples: hair color, eye color

-Polyphenism: describes the variation for different phenotypes that can arise from a certain gene based on different environmental conditions. An example of this is the sex of sea turtles determined by environmental temperature.

-Phenotypic plasticity: the ability of an organism to change in response to stimuli in the environment. The change can be in their behavior, how they look, or even the animal’s size. In ecology there’s Bergmann’s Rule, a phenomenon in regard to an animal’s body size. White tailed deer, for example, on average have a smaller mass the further south you go towards the equator. This is thought to be because it takes less energy to cool a smaller body.

-Fitness: The ability of an individual to produce viable offspring relative to others of the same species or in other words an animal’s success at surviving and reproducing in comparison to those of the same species.