As Climate Warms, Species May Need to Migrate or Perish

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With global warming pushing some animals and plants to the brink of extinction, conservation biologists are now saying that the only way to save some species may be to move them.

In the gentle hills outside York, England, a controversial experiment is quietly unfolding. It began in the summer of 2000 when Steven Willis, a biologist at the University of Durham, and his colleagues drove to a wildlife preserve called Wingate Quarry. In the back of their car was a cage full of butterflies called Marbled Whites. Willis and his colleagues removed the cage from the car, opened it, and let 500 butterflies flutter away across the scrubby meadows.

Marbled Whites are common in Europe and southern England, but in 2000 the northern edge of their range was 65 kilometers south of Wingate Quarry. Yet Willis and his colleagues suspected that they might do well there. Thanks to global warming, Wingate Quarry might now be mild enough for the butterflies to survive.

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Since releasing the butterflies, Willis and his students have returned to The Wildlife TrustsThe relocation of 500 Marbled White butterflies in York, England offers the first evidence of how managed relocation works.Wingate Quarry each year. They have walked a transect, counting the Marbled Whites they saw along the way, and have searched the area around the release to see how far they had dispersed. In February, they finally announced the results of their surveys in the journal Conservation Letters. The population of Marbled Whites of Wingate Quarry is steadily growing and slowly increasing its range. "They're certainly holding their own," says Willis.

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