Waching daily Jan 31 2018

So we know that in a lab setting at higher temperatures, insects reach

maturity sooner -- resulting in smaller adult body size. And given that global

temperatures have increased over the past century we were curious whether we

see similar trends in nature.

As a part of our insect ecology class we measured

body size of beetles to see if they have changed over time.

We measured 6,500 beetles across eight species from the Beaty Biodiversity

Museum collection.

And we photographed each box with a ruler next to it for

scale. We measured the body size using a computer software and we noted when and

where they were collected. All this information was analyzed with climate

data using statistics.

The largest species of beetles have shrunk about 20 per cent

over the last 45 years. When we added the climate data to our analysis we realized

that the warming temperatures have contributed to the shrinkage of beetle

body sizes.

Beetles are one of the most widespread and diverse groups of animals

on earth. They're found in almost all ecosystems and they play very important

roles -- for instance in pest control -- so now that we know that beetles are

shrinking we need to do more research to determine the effect of shrinking

beetles in nature and if other organisms are shrinking as well.