what are the adabtations that an animal makes to adjust to the climate?
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Answer:
When some animals (and plants) encounter the impacts of climate change in their environment, they respond by changing behavior and moving to a cooler area, modifying their physical bodies to better deal with the heat, or altering the timing of certain activities to match changes in the seasons. These “plastic” changes occur because some genes can produce more than one effect when exposed to different environments.
Epigenetics—how environmental factors cause genes to be switched on or off—bring about phenotypic plasticity mainly through producing organic compounds that attach to DNA or modifying the proteins that DNA is wound around. This determines whether and how a gene will be expressed, but it does not alter the DNA sequence itself in any way. In some cases, these changes can be passed along to the next generation, but epigenetic changes can also be reversed if the environmental stresses are eliminated.
Scientists don’t know whether all species have the capacity for epigenetic responses. For those that do, epigenetic changes could buy them time to evolve genetic adaptations to changing environmental conditions. And over the long term, phenotypic plasticity could become an evolutionary adaptation if the individuals with the genetic capacity for phenotypic plasticity are better suited to the new environment and survive to reproduce more.
“Like any trait, phenotypic plasticity can undergo natural selection,” emailed Dustin Rubinstein, associate professor in Columbia University’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology. “This means that when there is a benefit to having a plastic response to the environment, this can be favored by natural selection … Some traits (like behaviors) may be more likely to be plastic than others.”