Author: Matthew Davis / Source: Big Think
- New research on beetles shows that successive exposure to heatwaves reduces male fertility, sometimes to the point of sterility.
- The research has implications both for how the insect population will sustain itself as well as how human fertility may work on an increasingly hotter Earth.
- With this and other evidence, it is becoming clear that more common and more extreme heatwaves may be the most dangerous aspect of climate change.
When we hear that climate change causes “extreme weather events,” our minds jump to hurricanes ripping palm trees out of the ground or snowstorms burying cars. But one of the most dangerous kind of extreme weather event is much less visible than, say, a tornado tearing the roof of a house. Heatwaves kill more people than all other weather events combined, and they’re on the rise.
During the summer of 2003, an estimated 70,000 Europeans died when a deadly heatwave swept through the region. As the globe continues to warm, 150 Americans are projected to die every summer day by the mid-2040s. Aside from directly causing death from heatstroke, dehydration, other heat-related conditions, high heat also weakens cognition. Violent crimes, too, tend to spike on hotter-than-average days.
Now, a new study has uncovered another threat posed by heatwaves. It turns out the prolonged exposure to high heat reduces male fertility, and repeated exposure to successive heatwaves can even cause sterility.
Studying reproductive performance under heatwave conditions
Wikimedia Commons
This image shows the temperature anomalies across Europe during the devastating 2006 heatwave.
The study, recently published in Nature, examined the sperm viability of red flour beetles under heatwave conditions. In a corresponding blog post, study co-author Matthew Gage wrote, “a wealth of research since the start of last century, mainly on warm-blooded mammals (including humans), has shown that environmental or experimental warming by even a few degrees can cause declines in sperm quality and male ability to fertilise.”
He points out that most of these studies have been conducted on endothermic, or warm-blooded, animals, but very few studies have been conducted on exothermic, or cold-blooded, animals like insects. Given that the vast majority of animals are ectothermic and…
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