Fruit Flies Reaching Their Boiling Point

This article detailed current research about how many species of fruit flies lack the ability to tolerate even a modest increase in temperature. This is so worrying due to the fact that it was found that such species are close, or already beyond their “temperature safety margin,” and even more so, how such species do not the genetic aptitude to adapt to climate change. The research, conducted by researchers from Monash University, then delves into identifying the risk of extinction at the basic genetics level. This research hopes to provide the species greatest at risk in climates of greater extremes, or greater variation of heat, cold, and aridness. The current findings of the research are not optimistic about how species which evolved in more moderate environments will fare in more extreme environments, and concluded that only a very few species of the fruit fly could withstand higher temperatures, all of which were related and evolved in a more extreme relative environment. Dr. Kellerman, of the Monash University Molecular Ecology Research Group, ummated that such research would suggest that most of these species lack the gene to increase their heat resistance, essentially being “constrained by an evolutionary straitjacket.”

I thought that this article was extremely interesting, especially noting how we use Drosophila melanogaster so frequently as a model organism within genetics and other scientific experiments, and yet this information about their intolerance for temperature change  was just noted. I was also quite worried by the warning of “evolutionary straitjackets” that the article presented. What is to say that with the coming global warming, that the environment will not be so radically different that all species will not be able to adapt accordingly due to genetic limitations? Hopefully a more environmentally-conscious global perspective in combination with additional research into such genetic limitations will moderate the effect upon vulnerable species.