The endangered pandas in the Qinling Mountains might face a new threat: the loss of their food—bamboo, which makes up 99% of their meals.

Adult pandas spend most part of the day eating bamboo and have to take in at least 40 pounds a day to stay healthy. However, a new study published in Nature Climate Change warned that they may soon find their food gone because most of the bamboo in the Qinling Mountains might disappear by the end of the century as a result of the rising temperature worldwide.

A team made up of researchers from Michigan State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has studied the effects of climate change on the bamboo in the Qinling Mountains. They have found that bamboo is very sensitive to climate change. “80% to 100% of the bamboo would be gone if the average temperature increases 3.5 degrees worldwide by the end of the century,” said Liu Jianguo, one of the report’s authors.

He added, “This is how much the temperature would rise by 2100 even if all countries will keep their promises in The Paris Agreement. But you know what is happening around the world.”

In recent years, China has been trying its best to protect the endangered pandas by setting up more and bigger nature reserves.

“But it is far from being enough and the endangered pandas need cooperation from the rest of the world, because their future is not just in the hands of the Chinese,” said Shirley Martin from the World Wildlife Fund but not a member of the team.

There are about 260 pandas in the Qinling Mountains. That is about 13% of the China’s wild panda population. In addition, about 375 are living in research centers and zoos in China.

European rabbits might not be much to look at.They have a nondescript grayish-brown coat,small ears, and relatively short legs. But these ordinary animals are a keystone species that play an essential role in holding many ecosystems together in the United Kingdom, according to new research.

European rabbits live in grass and heathland habitats. They are somewhat picky eaters .When they graze(吃草),they scratch and dig holes,disturbing the ground and brush while they look for desirable food. These movements and how they disturb the ground help the ecosystem.

“Their grazing and digging activities create areas of bare soil which rare plants and invertebrates(无脊椎动物)require,”rabbit expert Diana Bell of the University of East Anglia’s School of Biology tells Treehugger.

Combined with all their digging and scraping,rabbits also contribute nutrients to the soil when they leave their waste on the soil. Researchers have found that this activity benefits.lowland grassland, heath, and dune habitats, which helps maintain beneficial conditions for many mosses,lichens,plants,insects,and bird species. Without the help of rabbits,many of these species would have to leave the area or might even die out,researchers say.

But European rabbits are facing a crisis.Due to threats such as disease, habitat loss,predators,and hunting,the animals are classified as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature(IUCN) in their native region.

One disease called myxomatosis is an insect-spread virus from South America that was intentionally introduced by a farmer in France in the mid- 1950s to control the rabbit population.About 90% of European rabbits died during early outbreaks and the disease continues to affect rabbit populations on this area.

According to new studies, many birds in the Amazon rainforest have become smaller as temperatures have increased. The difference hasn’t been obvious, but it has been significant enough that some scientists have suggested it’s a universal response to climate change.

But new research finds that the body size reductions aren’t happening across the board with some large-brained birds having much less significant changes.

For the study, researchers studied some data on about 70,000 birds that had died when they crashed into buildings in Chicago from 1978 to 2016. They added data on brain volume and lifespan (寿命) for 49 of the 52 species of migratory birds (候鸟) in the original study.

They found that birds with very large brains had reductions in overall body size that were about one-third of the reductions noted in birds with smaller brains. They thought that in birds, the species with big brains are the ones that build tools, manage to survive in tough environments, live longer, invest more time and energy into raising babies, and end up surviving better in the wild.

Researchers aren’t certain exactly how warmer temperatures might lead to decreasing body size in birds, but they are considering two possible explanations, which could even be happening at the same time. First, natural selection might be favoring birds that can dissipate heat better. This is because smaller birds have higher ratios (比例) of surface area to volume, so being small can help birds stay cool. Second, warmer summers might have less food available for birds at the time when they are feeding their babies. In that case, birds might be getting smaller because of decreased food over the years.

The findings don’t suggest that climate change is having zero impact on bigger-brained birds, but researchers believe these findings can inform us of climate change and help set conservation priorities.