{"id":85926,"date":"2025-04-08T11:19:33","date_gmt":"2025-04-08T16:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=85926"},"modified":"2025-04-08T11:19:34","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T16:19:34","slug":"how-kansas-wildlife-survives-during-rapidly-changing-weather-patterns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/?p=85926","title":{"rendered":"How Kansas wildlife survives during rapidly changing weather patterns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By CONNOR KEATING<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tiger Media Network<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t like the weather, just wait five minutes,\u201d is a phrase many Kansans have likely heard, and after the past few weeks, having blizzard conditions one day and then 70-degree heat the next, it almost seems like it\u2019s no exaggeration. While we humans have apps and websites capable of telling us what the weather is going to be like as well as heating and air conditioning, animals don\u2019t have those luxuries, begging the question, how do animals deal with the ever-changing Kansas weather as it transitions from winter to spring?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson Roberts, the zoological collections manager at Sternberg Museum of Natural History said he believes animals are more closely connected to the environment than we are, and have their own ways of sensing weather changes, and how animals respond to these changes is different for each group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roberts said some animals, like birds and mammals can still be seen in the winter due to being endothermic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey have the cellular ability to create their own body heat by metabolic processes,\u201d he said. \u201cYou look at the cold-blooded side of the spectrum, the ectotherms, so the reptiles and amphibians, they are not able to regulate their body temperature, thus their metabolisms internally have to rely on external energy sources; AKA the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to mammals, some are able to brace the harsh winter conditions, such as deer, who are even hunted during the winter, while other mammals, like bears, famously hibernate. The ectotherms do something similar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cReptiles and amphibians, that\u2019s the group I research and study,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cThey hibernate as well, but it\u2019s not a true hibernation, it\u2019s called brumation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roberts explained that brumation allows them to stay active enough that they can come up from out of their burrows and take advantage of the occasional warm or sunny day. He cited last month\u2019s rapid weather changes as examples of this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSnakes, in particular, have been documented on these weird 65-degree days that we\u2019re getting between these ice storms, and they can detect that heat from underground where they brumate,\u201d he said. \u201cThey come out to what we sometimes call, the apron of the burrow. So burrows usually have a soft spot where the dirt was kicked out, they\u2019ll come to the apron and they\u2019ll get a little bit of that heat, then they\u2019ll retreat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For ectotherms that live underwater, like fishes and turtles, they continue to remain active, even when the water above them is frozen solid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are things that go on in the water column that change nutrient flow, but overall oxygen increases in the water over winter. So fish do pretty well,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cTurtles are a great example of taking advantage of those (warm) winter days. It got up to like 55-60 and turtles in the Sternberg pond off the Howard Reynolds Nature Trail were basking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roberts said turtles are pretty incredible because they will overwinter under the water, or below the ice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s because they slow down enough that their oxygen intake is super slow, but in addition, many species of turtles that live here in the United States can actually perform cloacal breathing, so they breathe through their butts essentially,\u201d Roberts said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While ectothermic animals are able to take advantage of the occasional warm late winter or early spring day, for some of the endotherms, these sudden weather shifts can have more negative impacts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Medhavi Ambardar, an assistant professor of biology at FHSU, who specializes in ornithology, said she had noticed some unusual things happening during the first few warm weeks of the year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI noticed that several of our resident species, which are species that are here year-round – Northern Cardinals, Black Capped Chickadees – were singing their territorial songs,\u201d Ambardar said. \u201cSo these are songs that they\u2019re going to sing when they\u2019re getting ready to breed. I think some of what\u2019s happening is we\u2019re starting to get activation of the reproductive axis in the body, and then we get these drops in temperature, and what I\u2019ve noticed is we don\u2019t see a concurrent drop with the songs. They\u2019re still singing, even when it\u2019s kind of cold out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ambardar said a potential hazard of these changes in temperature is that while the birds are getting ready for reproduction, which takes quite a lot of energy to do, a sudden cold snap could potentially kill off a lot of the birds\u2019 food. An effect that can send ripples even to the time when their eggs start to hatch and there\u2019s still not enough food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ambardar also mentioned the cold snap in Texas during 2021, which had famously knocked out the power grid within the state, also had a major effect on the native birds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have a lot of eastern bluebirds, that winter down there, and that cold snap was so hard on them that it killed a lot of the population, and so when they normally would have been returning, we just didn\u2019t see those numbers of them,\u201d she said. \u201cThe population is returning now, but that is something that has happened before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One group of animals that is rarely ever seen during the winter months are the arthropods, creatures such as insects and arachnids that can commonly be seen around here. How does rapid temperature change affect them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fort Hays junior and Curatorial Assistant at the Sternberg, Isaac Fox, said those kinds of temperature changes aren\u2019t as big a deal to them, but the below-freezing to 80-degree swings can be impactful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEven then, usually the way they deal with it is during weather when it\u2019s not really ideal for them to be out and about, they\u2019ll take shelter under logs and rocks and such for most of the ground-dwelling stuff,\u201d he said. \u201cFor some of this other stuff like the mourning cloak common butterfly, the butterflies that overwinter as adults, they will be nestled down underneath loose bark and stuff during that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fox said that the main thing that kills insects is when they simply don\u2019t find a good enough spot to shelter, and end up drying out rather than freezing. A number of insect species actually overwinter as eggs or pupas, and because of this, aren\u2019t likely to come out early because of one warm week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With area temperatures expected in the upper 60s to low 80s the next week, expect more Kansas wildlife to emerge. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By CONNOR KEATING Tiger Media Network \u201cIf you don\u2019t like the weather, just wait five minutes,\u201d is a phrase many Kansans have likely heard, and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":142,"featured_media":85927,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3397,11,3403],"tags":[11134,15389,16215,16216],"class_list":["post-85926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-area-news","category-news","category-sternberg-news","tag-animal-science","tag-connor-keating","tag-fhsu-sternberg-museum","tag-kansas-wildlife"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tigermedianet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/PXL_20250322_222247062-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1920&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/142"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85926"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85929,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85926\/revisions\/85929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/85927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}