The effects of climate change often happen on a large scale, like drought or a rise in sea level. In the hills outside Missoula, Mont., wildlife biologists are looking at a change to something very small: the snowshoe hare.
Life as snowshoe hare is pretty stressful. For one, almost everything in the forest wants to eat you.
Alex Kumar, a graduate student at the University of Montana, lists the animals that are hungry for hares.
"Lynx, foxes, coyotes, raptors, birds of prey. Interestingly enough, young hares, their main predator is actually red squirrels."
Hares switch color in the spring and fall in response to light, when the days get longer or shorter. But that means they're at the mercy of the weather. If the snow comes late, you get a white hare on brown ground.
"And they really think that they're camouflaged," Kumar says. "They act like we can't see them. And it's pretty embarrassing for the hare."
Kumar calls this "mismatch," and it's becoming more of a concern with climate change.
"If the hares are consistently molting at the same time, year after year, and the snowfall comes later and melts earlier, there's going to be more and more times when hares are mismatched," he says.
Scott Mills of North Carolina State University leads the research. He says they're finding that mismatched hares die at higher rates. That's a concern for the threatened Canada lynx, which mainly eats these hares.
"It's a picture that paints a thousand words," Mills says. "It's a very clear connection to a single climate change stressor."
Mills says hares might be able to adapt over time. Some snowshoe hares in Washington State don't turn white at all. Mills is trying to figure out whether hares and other wildlife can adapt as fast as the climate is changing.
"But really what we don't know very well is how fast is too fast?" he says.
