Climate Change and its Effects on All Creatures Great and Small

chillibreeze writer — R P Subramanian

The house is overrun with spiders.

Now, I generally like having a few spiders as houseguests – especially hunting spiders, the fleet-footed ones that run down their prey. I find them to be quiet, shy and well-mannered creatures who serve the very useful and admirable purpose of keeping the insect population in the premises within tolerable limits. The spiders probably like me too. From their perspective, I as their host, offer a vast, sheltered environment in which they can lead happy, sustainable lives, hunting down and devouring an assortment of delicious hors d’ oeuvres—woodlice, silverfish, ants, flies, beetles, crickets, cockroaches and other household pests.

Despite our cordial co-existence, though, the spiders and I respect each others’ personal spaces. We eat separately; we do not snoop too closely into each others’ love lives; indeed, as far as possible we stay at a healthy distance from one another as we potter about the house on our respective duties.

But of late, there’ve been just too many spiders about the premises. There’s one now, crouched barely a foot away from my hand, even as I sit here struggling for the third day to put down an article on—of all things—climate change. Like its other eight-legged resident cousins, this spider is a bright-red bristly little beast, its formidable jaws locked into what appears to be a sardonic grin as it stares at me through its glittering, multi-lens compound eye. I make a face at it but it doesn’t stir; instead, its grin appears to widen. I clench my fist at it and growl; it starts, puts on a hurt expression and scuttles away at incredible speed to disappear behind the printer at the other end of the table.

I gaze at the screen again, my thoughts on climate change now hopelessly jumbled up with thoughts of spiders. The curious thing is, these red hunting spiders are relative newcomers to the neighborhood. I live in Delhi, India, on the east bank of the Yamuna River. Till two years ago we never saw red spiders in these parts; the only hunting spiders that dwelt here were grey-black in colour and much smaller. But now the red beasts are everywhere…and the grey-black ones have disappeared!

Now that I think about it, it’s not just the spiders that are newcomers. In place of the friendly and rather foolish black ants that had the run of the house till recently, there’s a new kind of ant foraging about the place now; a small, slow-moving, brownish-red creature. Unlike the inoffensive black ants which left our food alone barring an occasional raid into the jar of sugar, these red ants devour practically anything that is not made of concrete. The red ants are everywhere now…and the black ants have disappeared without trace.

Interestingly, the red spiders regard red ants as a kind of fast food. They seem to know that the ants love wandering along the edges of walls, and they lay traps for the ants. In each room of the house, the edges and corners of the walls are decorated with tiny blobs of grey-white silk. Inside each blob sits a red spider, waiting patiently till an unwary ant wanders by, whereupon it pounces upon the ant, drags it back into its silky den and devours it in a trice.

Red ants in place of black ants; red spiders in place of grey-black spiders; what’s going on?

Nature is filled with pattern, with purpose; species don’t appear and disappear in a place without a very solid underlying reason.

Could that reason have something to do with changing climate?

Suddenly, I remember something I’d written late last night, on the effects of climate change on living creatures. Quickly, I scroll back a few pages on the screen and read:

… In the last two centuries, we humans have been burning away wood, coal, oil and gas—what we call fossil fuels—at such a terrific rate that our atmosphere has got far too much carbon dioxide in it. As a result, the atmosphere is trapping too much heat from sunlight—scientists call this the greenhouse effect. The increasingly warm atmosphere is in turn changing climate across the world. Warm seasons are becoming warmer and longer; cold seasons are becoming shorter and less cold. Polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and the sea levels are slowly but surely rising. The seas themselves are becoming warmer, because of which wind and rain patterns across the world are changing in quite dramatic and unpredictable ways.

So, will all this global climate change affect life? Of course it will!

After all, it is climate that determines what kinds of creatures—animal and plant—exist in a particular area. For instance, the plants and animals in the Arctic and Antarctic are specifically adapted to short summers and extremely long, cold, dry and dark winters; likewise, the plants and animals of the Equatorial regions are specifically adapted to perennially hot, sunny and humid conditions. If, for some reason, the climate in a place changes dramatically, not just some but ALL the creatures that live there will be affected profoundly by the change in climate. This is because all things in Nature are held in a fine balance. The lives of all creatures—from a tiny bacterium to a giant rhinoceros, from the smallest of plants to the largest of predators—are connected to one another in a delicate equilibrium. Disturb the equilibrium…and you create a ripple effect that will sooner or later affect all living creatures to differing degrees.

For instance, if certain plant species die out due to climate change, all the creatures that feed on those plants will be threatened …and so will all the predators that feed on those creatures! Species that cannot adapt to the new climate will be forced to migrate to other places where the climate suits them and where they can find food. Else, they will perish.

The warmest climates are around the Equator and the coldest climates are around the Poles. So, as climate changes across the world, species will tend to migrate away from the Equator and head northwards and southward, through the Temperate zones towards the Poles…

A sudden movement in the corner of my vision distracts my attention. It’s the red spider again, scuttling up to the top edge of the desk-calendar. It sits there and stares at me, flexing its jaws in a kind of contemplative way.

I stare back at it and wonder: is it possible that these red spiders lived in some other place till recently? Some place that’s become too warm in recent years due to climate change? Maybe the red spiders just couldn’t adapt to the warmer conditions…and so they all packed their bags and moved over here!

But then, what about the disappearance of the grey-black spiders that lived here earlier? I ponder awhile…and then the answer hits me. Delhi’s climate, too, has changed perceptibly in the last ten years. The winters are much shorter and milder than before; the summers are longer, hotter and more humid. Perhaps the grey-black spiders just couldn’t take this new kind of climate, and so they too have migrated to cooler climes north of Delhi… perhaps in the foothills of the Himalayas! And the black ants must have fled with them.

Why, that might explain the coming of the red ants too! Maybe the red ants lived in the same place as the red spiders; maybe both migrated here together, predators and prey fleeing climate change side by side!

It’s a nice idea; but the trouble is, how could one prove it? Climate change itself is so hard to measure, because it takes place over long periods of time….scores, even hundreds or thousands of years. So how could one possibly keep track of species migrations over such lengths of time, and what’s more, link the migrations to climate change?

Inspired by a sudden brainwave, I pick up the phone and call a friend who lives in Kausani—a delightful little place in the Himalayan foothills, about 200 km north of Delhi as the crow flies (or as the grey-black spider migrates, I think to myself). She picks up the phone.

“Listen…have you noticed any new insects around your place in recent years?” I ask her. “Like, are there any grey-black spiders running around your house?”

“I don’t know about grey-black spiders and I don’t want to meet them,” she replies. “But I’m going crazy with these black ants that’ve suddenly appeared out of nowhere this year. They don’t bite, thank Heavens…but they finish off a month’s supply of sugar in a day!”

I put down the phone and gaze at the red spider, who is now eyeing a small red ant on the wall in a distinctly hungry manner. Both red spider and red ant have successfully adapted to climate change. By migrating northwards.

The question is: Where will we humans migrate?

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—About our writer:

R P Subramanian is a banker-turned freelance writer based in Delhi. A science graduate from North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, he is currently consultant writer for TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi). He cooks to survive, loves music (used to play the drums for rock bands in the old days in Shillong), reads a lot and remembers very little.

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