Albatross Evolution Too Slow for Warming, Study Finds

A PNAS study finds emission cuts halve black-browed albatross extinction risk, while evolution alone can't keep pace with warming.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that black-browed albatrosses, long-lived seabirds of the Southern Ocean, may not evolve fast enough to survive climate change. Drawing on more than three decades of demographic and phenotypic observations, researchers including Stéphanie Jenouvrier of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution modeled how traits such as wing length, behavior, and breeding timing pass from parents to offspring and affect survival and reproduction. The team found that substantially limiting greenhouse gas emissions reduced the projected probability of extinction by approximately half, while evolution helped under some conditions but generally could not prevent population declines under future warming scenarios.

The result challenges the idea of 'evolutionary rescue' — a population avoiding extinction through adaptive genetic change after its environment deteriorates — as a reliable buffer against climate-driven biodiversity loss. According to SciTechDaily, simulations showed that inheritance alone offered little protection against extinction, and that the outcome also depended on how strongly natural selection favored useful traits and where in the life cycle those traits acted. Co-author Joanie Van de Walle of the Université du Québec à Rimouski noted that while traits like wing length can help young birds survive, the key question is whether such evolutionary changes can happen fast enough to keep pace with a warming climate.

The researchers combined long-term records from the population with data on trait inheritance and future climate projections, letting natural selection emerge in the model while accounting for uncertainty and natural climate fluctuations. According to SciTechDaily, under the relatively stable conditions of the past, populations allowed to adapt grew larger than those without adaptation, and evolutionary responses contributed to persistence when warming was sufficiently limited — but stronger warming generally overwhelmed those benefits. 'Evolution can help populations cope with environmental change, but our results show that it has limits,' Jenouvrier said, adding that limiting climate change matters far more for persistence than adaptation alone.

The findings arrive as other sectors confront warming they cannot adapt around quickly either. ABC News reports that a 2024 study found warming temperatures could make 70% of the world's wine-growing regions unsuitable for grapes if global temperatures exceed a certain threshold, prompting growers to try cover crops, no-till regenerative farming, reforestation, and hybrid cold-climate varieties. Both cases point the same direction: slowing the rate of change gives adaptation room to work. For albatrosses, the message is explicit — according to SciTechDaily, co-author Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said reducing greenhouse gas emissions slows population decline and enables evolutionary adaptation to promote persistence.