Some species of Australian birds are shrinking and the trend will likely continue because of global warming, a scientist said Sunday. Scientists postulate that the relationship between a warmer climate and smaller animals may be true for the animal kingdom as a whole. Janet Gardner, an Australian National University biologist, led a team of scientists which measured museum specimens to plot the decline in size of eight species of Australian birds over the past century. The research, published last week in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, found the birds in Australia's southeast had become between 2 percent to 4 percent smaller. Over the same century, Australia's average daily temperature rose 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit (0.7 degrees Celsius), with the sharpest increase since the 1950s. The research concluded the birds were likely downsizing because smaller bodies shed heat faster than larger ones. “It's the broad scale, consistent pattern that we're seeing that makes us conclude that global warming is likely to be causing the changes,” Gardner told The Associated Press on Sunday. She said she suspected other Australian birds beyond the species studied were also shrinking and the trend will accelerate in the future as a result of global climate change. Michael Kearney, a Melbourne University zoologist, described its findings as both alarming and providing some hope for the future. “This study strongly suggests that rising air temperatures in recent history have been stressful enough to prevent the larger individuals of a species from surviving and breeding,” Kearney said. “But it also gives us some hope that evolutionary change will provide a temporary buffer in some cases.” Other studies have found similar trends of shrinking birds and mammals in Britain, Denmark, Israel and New Zealand. Birds and other animals around the world tend to be larger closer to the poles than those nearer to the equator.
