PHOENIX (NBC, KYMA) – Arizona’s rising summer heat may be more than even desert wildlife can handle.<\/p>\n
In response, the Phoenix Zoo is creating an air-conditioned habitat to protect them.<\/p>\n
“So the lizards we’re going to be putting in, the native Sonoran Desert Lizards, obviously are used to warm weather. But, you know, every year it gets hotter and hotter for longer,” said Bradley Lawrence with the zoo.<\/p>\n
Lizards can’t regulate their body temperature, so when it’s hot, so are they. Normally when that happens, they usually go underground or in the shade, but that’s not enough anymore.<\/p>\n
“Reptiles like warm weather, but the extreme triple digits, they’re not a fan of…Growing up, I never thought we would have to worry about cooling off desert reptiles, but we do,” Lawrence expressed.<\/p>\n
So the desert reptiles, who’ve survived who knows how long in the Arizona desert, are getting air conditioning.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to run cold water through the concrete to keep them cooled down even more,” Lawrence shared.<\/p>\n
While that’s in the zoo, but wildlife biologist Mike Cardwell shares what happens in the wild when it’s too hot.<\/p>\n
“The snakes go underground and if it stays hot, they’ll sometimes stay underground for a month or so during the hottest part of the summer. But then after the heat started to subside, late in the summer, early fall, these guys didn’t come up,” Cardwell spoke.<\/p>\n
Cardwell studies rattlesnakes for the Arizona Poison Center in Tucson. They had two snakes radio-tagged back in 2023, and they stopped moving.<\/p>\n
“In 25 years of radio-tracking, a lot of rattlesnakes in the Mojave Desert and the Sonoran Desert, I never had a rattlesnake fail to emerge after being underground during the summer,” Cardwell expressed.<\/p>\n
Those rattlesnakes had died, and Cardwell thinks they died during a historically bad heat wave: A string of days over 110 degrees.<\/p>\n
However, the ground didn’t cool off enough and stayed hotter than the snakes could survive.<\/p>\n
Wildlife experts say if this keeps up, and by all accounts it probably will, we’re looking at a bunch of wildlife changes.<\/p>\n
“But is it entirely possible that in the future, some of these animals that we see around Phoenix aren’t going to be around Phoenix anymore? Yeah, I mean, in my opinion, we’re headed for a direction where the climate is changing faster than species can evolve to adapt to it,” Lawrence remarked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHOENIX (NBC, KYMA) – Arizona’s rising summer heat may be more than even desert wildlife can handle. In…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":224194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5131],"tags":[5229,5643,1587,1589,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-224193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-phoenix","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-arizona","10":"tag-az","11":"tag-phoenix","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115198376366969136","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}