Nature Boy had made a habit of lingering over his second cup of morning coffee. His first cup provided high-octane jet fuel. The second cup paused the early-morning momentum before he headed out to catch his bus.
However, the second-cup habit started to interfere with Nature Boy’s schedule. He started to miss his bus.
Nature Boy’s departure from the house depends on a consistent sequence of events that is triggered by his alarm. The bus’s arrival at the stop down the street depends on factors that have nothing to with Nature Boy. Where once his and the bus’s arrival at the stop consistently coincided, the timing has gone awry.
The asynchrony, or mis-timing, caused inconvenience for a few people, but nothing that couldn’t be resolved with a few phone calls, text messages and emails, and Nature Boy postponing that second cup of coffee until he reached the office.
For other critters, asynchrony can have dire consequences. Researchers have found that timing between birds, bears, bugs and buds, for example, can call their future into question.
If you’re a three-ounce bird that has just flown 5,000 kilometres, a bear that has just awakened from five months in hibernation or a caterpillar that has just hatched from an overwintering egg, you can’t afford to miss the springtime gravy train. Being out of step with critical food-producing conditions in your environment can tip the balance between mating or missing out, raising a family or watching them starve, or surviving and thriving or becoming a dried-up twig on your own family tree.
Bears generally emerge from hibernation about the same time every year — an event triggered by their own internal body clocks. When they emerge, they need to eat. When hibernation’s end coincides with rampant spring growth, bruins happily feast close to home. But when spring is delayed and the alpine remains under snow, the bears venture valley-ward in search of food.
As residents of Coquitlam experienced repeatedly this spring, a late spring, hungry bears and garbage stored outside make for close encounters of the uncomfortable kind for humans and the usually deadly kind for bears.
Victoria-area forest researchers identified another example of asynchrony among the bugs and the buds. They found that a century-long ocean-warming trend might have suppressed western spruce budworm infestations on southern Vancouver Island during the past eight decades.
Mild winter temperatures, linked to a rise in sea temperature, have de-synchronized local interactions between the caterpillars and Douglas-fir trees, their preferred hosts. Budworm larvae now emerge earlier in the year, while the timing of Douglas-fir bud flush remains unchanged. The trees do not respond to the early warming because their new bud growth depends almost entirely on day length.
Springtime bird migration also is cued primarily by day length. But conditions at migratory birds’ breeding grounds depend on weather that can vary from year to year. As climate warms in northern regions, spring occurs earlier. Researchers are finding, however, that some species of migratory birds are not keeping pace with the changes.
In a study of 48 migratory songbird species across North America, the scientists found that, in any one region, both the birds’ and spring’s arrivals have changed over time — usually in the same direction, either earlier or later. However, the researchers also found that nine bird species did not sufficiently adjust their arrival time to keep up with increasingly early spring green-up. Also, across all species, the difference in timing between arrival and green-up increased by more than one-half day each year.
During the period studied, as green-up occurred earlier in the east, arrival of eastern breeding species lagged ever further behind. In the West, where green-up typically happened later, birds arrived increasingly earlier relative to green-up.
If the divergence trend continues, the early birds might not get any worms. The western birds might eventually arrive too far in advance of spring. They might have to wait too long before the landscape can serve up sufficient bugs, buds and other birdy num-nums to replenish their exhausted, hungry bodies, let alone fuel the subsequent season of mating and breeding.
In nature, as in Nature Boy’s morning routine, timing is everything.
