Newswise — The human and economic costs of natural disasters, which many believe are becoming more frequent and more intense, are well known and well documented.
But Jonathan Pruitt, a leading evolutionary ecologist and Canada 150 Chair in Biological Dystopias, wants to explore what happens on an entirely different level: how hurricanes wreak havoc on hundreds of species within an ecosystem after natural habitats are torn apart by massive storms.
Raging winds, for example, can demolish trees, defoliate entire canopies and scatter coarse woody debris across the forest floor.
He is travelling to 80 different sites, along the Gulf Coast in the southern United States and throughout Australia, including Queensland and the Northern Territory, to evaluate natural selection in environments prone to disasters. To do so, he is in the process of setting up research stations where he is trapping, analyzing and documenting native insect and plant populations before and after hurricane season hits.
“This will enable us to look at the impacts of tropical cyclones on entire food webs containing hundreds of species, from plants to apex predators,” says Pruitt.
“We will be able to see what kinds of food web structures are better able to endure cyclones, which are devastated by them, and which bounce back quickly or slowly. No one has done work like this before,” he says.
Some of his early findings in Louisiana, for example, suggest that hurricanes are messing up the ecosystem and allowing invasive species like fire ants to gain a foothold. Pruitt believes the hurricanes have weakened their native competitors and predators or increased other kinds of resources that enable fire ants to surge in numbers.
Pruitt is believed to be the first to conduct this kind of research, which poses many challenges. While weather tracking technology can predict hurricanes, landfall positioning, timing and intensity are far more difficult to forecast, making research of this nature complicated.
“The environmental impacts of tropical cyclones will grow as sea levels rise,” says Pruitt. “So there is a tremendous need to understand the environmental impacts of these storms, particularly on natural selection.”
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