In May, the U.S. government declared that the salmon stocks were so decimated they shut down fishing for salmon (which would have commenced this fall) along the California and Oregon coasts for the first time in 160 years. Scientists will be studying the collapse to identify all the triggers, but it is believed that inhospitable spawning grounds is one.

Most of the threatened species are not such a direct part of our food chain. Still, their stories have relevance for humans. Some, like the “snow-dependent” creatures of the North American Rockies, could be considered our “canaries in a coal mine” with regard to global warming, says Dr. Kevin S. McKelvey, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Montana.

McKelvey, who studies the Canadian Lynx, the wolverine and the Snowshoe Hare, has seen how these animals are affected by the earlier springs and erratic weather changes that many attribute to climate change. The changes are stripping them of the mountain snow pack they need to survive and playing havoc with their climatic adaptations.

Dorothy Keeler

If a Snowshoe Hare, for instance, remains white in the spring because the snow has vanished earlier than normal (or stays brown when there’s new snow in the fall), the animal loses his camouflage and becomes easy prey.

If a wolverine — an animal that is so sparsely distributed in the United States there may only be 100 of them left — loses his snowy territory, his bridges to other reproducing wolverines spread out of hundreds of square miles dwindle.

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