Researchers are trying to understand how changes in the environment lead to changes in organisms. For example, how do warmer spring and summer days affect how well the caterpillar of a common Washington butterfly grows? One way to answer this type of question is by repeating an old experiment years later to see how results have changed over time.

, 91探花 professor of biology, recently had the opportunity to organize a featuring papers that use these types of “functional resurvey” experiments to answer questions about a variety of organisms, from bacteria to plants and animals. For example, one study explores resurrecting flower seeds to reveal evolutionary responses to drought. Another compares the genetics of coral reef fish preserved in rum in 1908 to these same fish now to examine how populations changed over the past century.

91探花News spoke with Buckley about these experiments and what they can tell us about how organisms change over time.

What are the benefits of repeating historical experiments?

Lauren Buckley: As environments shift, species are migrating, changing in abundance and interacting with new species in response. But we lack effective strategies to anticipate these changes and plan for impacts to agriculture, disease and biodiversity. Repeating historical experiments reveals the processes underlying biological responses and should allow us to improve our ability to predict what will happen in the future.

Are there any drawbacks involved in these experiments?

LB: Replicating methods based on the descriptions in published papers can be difficult. We also face challenges, such as working with poorly preserved data or specimens, or trying to control for other changes that have happened over time 鈥� for example, Seattle is drastically different than it was 25 years ago. Knowing the best time to repeat an experiment is also a challenge, but wait times can be surprisingly short for organisms with short life cycles, such as bacteria.

Our current work is uncovering evolutionary changes in Washington butterflies after 25 years. This research is made easier because we are collaborating with the original researcher, who is 25 years older than me. We joke that the undergraduate researchers, who are 25 years younger than me, are expected to repeat the study again in 25 years.

How common is this technique?

LB: When I was looking for examples of functional resurvey experiments to include in the special issue, I was surprised to find that not many people use the approach. Many of the experimental approaches that we think hold the most promise for repeating are now decades old 鈥� perfect timing to be repeated. Also, the accelerating environmental change over recent decades has rapidly expanded opportunities for more of these types of experiments. I hope more scientists will be inspired to use this technique.

Functional resurvey experiments can be great fun! It鈥檚 exciting to plot new data against past experimental results and, despite our best efforts at improving predictions, we are often surprised by the biological changes. We get to see evolution happening, but not necessarily in the way we expect.

听For more information, contact Buckley at buckley@uw.edu.

As insect populations decrease worldwide 鈥� in what some have called an “insect apocalypse” 鈥� biologists seek to understand how the six-legged creatures are responding to a warming world and to predict the long-term winners and losers.

A new study of grasshoppers in the mountains of Colorado shows that, while the answers are complicated, biologists have much of the knowledge they need to make these predictions and prepare for the consequences. The , published Jan. 30 in PLOS Biology, compares thousands of grasshoppers collected in Colorado between 1958 and 1960 with modern-day specimens.

“Understanding what species are likely to be winners and losers with climate change has been really challenging so far,” said corresponding author , a professor of biology at the 91探花. “Hopefully this work starts to demonstrate some principles by which we can improve predictions and figure out how to appropriately respond to ecosystem changes stemming from climate change.”

Comparing museum specimens and newly collected insects allowed the research team to assess the impact of 65 years of climate change on the sizes of six species of grasshopper. Because insects are cold-blooded and don’t generate their own heat, their body temperatures and rates of development and growth are more sensitive to warming in the environment.

Despite much speculation that animals will to lessen heat stress as the climate warms, the study found that some of the grasshopper species actually grew larger over the decades, taking advantage of an earlier spring to fatten up on greenery.

Growth was seen only in species that overwintered as juveniles and thus could get a head start on chowing down in the spring. Species that hatched in the spring from eggs laid in the fall did not have this advantage and became smaller over the years, likely as a result of vegetation drying up earlier in the summer.

“This research emphasizes that there will certainly be species that are winners and losers, but sub-groups within those species鈥� populations, depending on their ecological or environmental context, will have different responses,” said co-author , a postdoctoral researcher at both the 91探花and the University of California, Berkeley.

The authors of the new study predicted much of this based on the lifecycles of the grasshoppers and the environmental conditions at the site.

“We sat down and looked at all that was known about the system, such as elevational gradients and how that should modify responses and how different grasshoppers might respond, with all the wealth of information we knew about their natural history. And while not all our predictions were supported, many of them actually were,” said co-author of the University of California, Berkeley.

The 65-year-old was first assembled over three summers by the late entomologist Gordon Alexander of the University of Colorado Boulder. He not only collected and mounted the specimens from plots in the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, but also documented the timing of six different life stages of the grasshoppers. His death in a plane crash in 1973 left the specimens, pinned in neat rows in 250 wooden boxes, in limbo.

The collection languished until 2005, when , then a postdoctoral fellow at CU Boulder, set about curating the collection and initiated a re-survey of the same sites to collect more grasshoppers.

Nufio and many others eventually collected about 17,000 new grasshopper specimens from the same or similar sites. While the new paper is the first to report the grasshopper size changes between 1960 and 2015, the authors conducted other studies to help explain the patterns.

The insects were from a large group of nondescript grasshoppers in the Acrididae family that are known as . Most graze on many types of plants, though some specialize in grasses. Two species (Eritettix simplex and Xanthippus corallipes) achieve adulthood as early as May; two (Aeropedellus clavatus and Melanoplus boulderensis) mature in mid-June; and two (Camnula pellucida and Melanoplus sanguinipes) mature in late July.

The researchers found that the grasshopper species that achieve adulthood in May increased in size at lower elevations, around 6,000 feet, while the early and late emergers in these locations decreased in size over the decades.

“The data are consistent with grasshoppers either being able to take advantage of warming by getting bigger and coming out earlier, or for grasshoppers to experience stress and get smaller,” Buckley said.

鈥淲e would expect similar trends for grasshoppers in mountains in Washington, but some later snow melt in Washington state might alter the importance of seasonal timing,鈥� she added.

Other experiments Buckley performed on in Colorado show some of the same trends.

“We find a pretty similar message with butterflies, which is hopeful to me, in that if we can consider some basic biological principles, we really increase our ability to predict climate change responses,” Buckley said.

At the UW, Buckley鈥檚 research group is repeating surveys begun in 1995 of cabbage white butterflies in Seattle and western white butterflies in central Washington to see how those insects might have changed over the past 30 years.

Buckley also recently became an adjunct curator of entomology at the Burke Museum, where she hopes to continue leveraging museum collections for ecological research.

Other co-authors on the new study are , a graduate student in biology at the UW; Simran Bawa of UC Berkeley; and Ebony Taylor, Michael Troutman and Sean Schoville of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Buckley at lbuckley@uw.edu, Williams at cmw@berkeley.edu and Sheffer at msheffer@berkeley.edu.

This article is adapted from a UC Berkeley

NSF grants: DEB-1951356, DEB-1951588, DEB-1951364