To find out whether climate change is threatening the natural balance by waking up the bees and the blooms weeks sooner atop Pikes Peak, you’d need the help of equally motivated weather and biology nerds from 100 years ago who were meticulous about observing and recording conditions.
Luckily for University of Colorado climate researchers, there are ledgers to be had from 1923 and beyond, detailing the temperature and budding-plant observations of Frederic and Edith Clements. They fanned out on a regular basis from their Alpine Laboratory established on the slopes of Pikes beginning in the early 1900s, perhaps oblivious to the potential havoc of the industrial revolution raging all around them but well in-tune with nature.
Valid comparisons in hand, CU associate ecology and evolutionary biology professor Julian Resasco in Boulder started sending his colleagues and grad students onto the same slopes in 2019. From May through the summer, for the next few years, they kneeled to identify plant blooms and swept bug nets in search of pollinators.
The results?
Both the buds and the bees are starting nearly two weeks earlier than 100 years ago, a major biodiversity disruption, according to their study published in late September in the peer-reviewed “American Naturalist.” The study shows higher average temperatures in spring are kicking wildflowers out of bed 17 days sooner than in 1923. But the honeybees and other pollinators are only waking up 11 days early, meaning they are “out of sync” with almost a week of great foraging time.
“If the trends continue, there could be mismatches in timing between pollinators and the plants they feed on,” the study authors say.
Julian Resasco, foreground, and two graduate students on one of their surveys of the date-emergence of pollinators and wildflowers on the slopes of Pikes Peak, near Colorado Springs. (Andrew Gaier/CU Boulder)Among other findings, researchers say the western bumblebee comes out of winter hiding 12 days later than it used to, potentially depriving it of early-blooming food sources.
But there could be positive news — while some birds and flowers will be out of sync, others might actually line up better with the changes. The key, researchers say, is to protect habitat from development to give the birds and the bees time to work all this out.
Pollinators are key to the ecosystem, helping maintain biodiversity, said Resasco, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “We have a responsibility to make sure they don’t disappear,” he said.
The CU team took inventories of wildflowers and their pollinator partners at various levels on Pikes Peak, which tops out at 14,115 feet west of Colorado Springs. Climate change has cut deeply into the life-giving spring snowpack available on tall mountains like Pikes, while the average winter temperature in Colorado has gone up 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit, in a century. The all-season Colorado average has risen by 2.9 degrees, the study says.
Other studies based on the new observations will look precisely at how often pollinators are visiting plants, which could tell more about the relative health of various pollinating bugs under pressure from warmer temperatures, pesticides and land development. While Resasco’s group was hiking Pikes Peak, they were mindful of similar historic comparisons made by researchers in the fields of Illinois plowed fence post to fence post for corn and other grains.
“We know how things are happening in places like southern Illinois, where all the habitat’s been destroyed. It’s less clear in places that are still pretty natural, like Pikes Peak,” said Resasco, who is currently doing research in Spain.
The CU researchers remind study readers that the disruptions and mismatches can send more than one signal to stewards of wildlife.
“If you look at sort of the general pattern in plants and pollinators, they’re both going earlier. But that doesn’t mean that all the species are shifting in the same way,” Resasco said. “So there could be reshuffling that can also happen. Sometimes the interaction misses a partner. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t somebody else there to pick up the slack, on the pollination.”
A difference between Illinois and Colorado, Resasco said, is “if the habitat remains, a lot of the biodiversity remains. And in the face of these coming climate stressors, that gives them the best bet for being resilient, and especially places like Pikes Peak that are really heterogeneous, that have lots of climate refuges. All those things can really help in the face of climate stressors.”
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