Environment
Climate change tinkers with animal relationships, survival
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By JACK NISSEN
Capital News Service
LANSING — How climate change manipulates relationships among organisms and ecosystems remains largely a mystery. The only predictable is that species that do well in warmer conditions might have an advantage over species that do well in colder conditions, said Hank Vanderploeg, a researcher with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor. Scientists are beginning to explore what kinds of changes species will be experiencing as the colder months begin to grapple with warmer temperatures. But they don’t yet know how all the rules of the game fit together. It is an ecological experiment taking place, said Jeffrey Andresen, Michigan’s state climatologist and a geography professor at Michigan State University.