Climate Change Sex Change

New Zealand’s tuatara may be one for the climate change history books. It's a lizard-like creature that's become global warming's latest canary in the dirty coal mine.

The two species of tuatara are the only surviving members of the Sphenodontians which flourished around 200 million years ago, but because of climate change, they are reaching the end of a very long earthly run for a very peculiar reason.

While politicians battle over the atmospheric effects of climate change, New Zealand’s tuatara’s sensitive reproductive organs are reacting.

Unlike penguins whose dwindling numbers result from habitat loss and fishing, the tuatara is suffering from male-only offspring.

When tuatara nest at temperatures above 21.5 degrees Celsius, they are incapable of producing females, according to research by the University of Western Australia. With this single sex procreation, according to the university’s computer modeling predictions, this means the reptile faces extinction in this century.

“Since the mid 1990s, people have been talking about the vulnerability of reptiles to climate change because they have temperature-dependent sex determination. But no one has been able to model it in this type of complexity before,” says research leader Nicola Mitchell of the University of Western Australia in Perth.

Until now.

To those who may question such doomsday predictions, Michael Kearney of the University of Melbourne, Australia states, “We asked the model what the ultimate sex ratio would be on nests where we knew the observed temperature fluctuations and it was very consistent with what we had observed.”

Via Nature.

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