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A cracked riverbed along the Sacramento River during a drought in California<\/p>\n
Kyle Grillot\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
For the first time, we have seen a species that was in decline due to extreme weather recover through rapid evolution. Does this mean species that are increasingly being hit by soaring temperatures<\/a> and other challenging conditions can adapt as the planet gets warmer?<\/p>\n It is clear that evolution has saved countless species from climate change in the past. Over the past half a billion years, Earth\u2019s climate has varied from much hotter than it is now \u2013 with crocodiles in the Arctic \u2013 to much colder. Plants and animals have had to adapt to survive and migrate with shifting climes.<\/p>\n But the key issue is time. Until now, the fastest climate change we know of was the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum<\/a>, which occurred around 56 million years ago, when temperatures rose 5\u00b0C to 8\u00b0C over a period of roughly 20,000 years. Now temperatures could rise by more than 4\u00b0C by the end of the century<\/a>. Can evolution really make a difference over such a short time?<\/p>\n The answer to that is definitely yes<\/a>, at least for organisms with short generations. The latest evidence comes from a wild plant called the scarlet monkeyflower (Mimulus cardinalis), which managed to evolve its way out of the megadrought that affected California between 2012 and 2015.<\/p>\n Daniel Anstett<\/a> at Cornell University in New York state and his colleagues began studying monkeyflowers in 2010, assessing how well the plants were doing at a number of sites across their range each year and taking samples for DNA sequencing.<\/p>\n Monkeyflowers are water-loving plants that live along streams, says Anstett, so they were hit hard by the drought. \u201cIf you were to put one in a pot and not water it for a few days, it would just die,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Three local populations did indeed die out. But many of those that survived appear to have evolved drought tolerance in just three years, with many mutations in parts of their genome linked to climate adaptations \u2013 and it was these populations that recovered fastest after the drought.<\/p>\n This is what biologists call evolutionary rescue \u2013 a species surviving a threat by rapid evolution<\/a>. It has been demonstrated in several labs<\/a>, but Anstett says this is the first time it has been shown to have happened in the wild.<\/p>\n The scarlet monkeyflower is a water-loving plant<\/p>\n Douglas Tolley \/ Alamy<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to show because you need three things,\u201d he says: showing that a population is declining due to a threat, that it has adapted genetically in response and that those genetic changes enabled it to recover.<\/p>\n There are lots of possible examples of evolutionary rescue, including finches in the Galapagos<\/a> changing in response to drought, Tasmanian devils evolving in response to a transmissible cancer<\/a>, pests evolving resistance to pesticides<\/a> and killifish adapting to cope with extreme levels of pollution<\/a> in US rivers. But biologists haven\u2019t been able to tick all three boxes in these cases, says Anstett.<\/p>\n \u201cThat third link, to be able to show that the recovery is explained by rapid evolution, that has never been done before at the scale of an entire range of the species,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n![\"J3M951](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/SEI_289051351.jpg\")
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