This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.Climate change. It’s the culprit behind an increase in droughts and floods, wildfires and storms.And a new study shows that it’s making more meerkats come down with tuberculosis.The findings appear in the journal Nature Climate Change.So tuberculosis is an endemic disease in meerkats.It has been present in the population since meerkats have been studied.Maria Paniw is a researcher at the Donana Biological Research Station in Spain.She says that for meerkats living in the Kalahari, TB outbreaks have been on the rise.Coincidentally, so have the local temperatures.So we wanted to know whether there was a link between climate change, which you know, has been increasing temperature extremes, and increases in tuberculosis outbreaks.And how this may affect populations of this social species.So Paniw and her colleagues crunched the numbers.I was very fortunate to collaborate with the Kalahari Meerkat Project which is a fantastic project where we now have over 22 years of very detailed data on individual meerkats and about their survival, their reproduction, their growth, their movement, and so on.So it’s a very rich data set to work with.They used the data to build models to predict how climate change will affect meerkat populations.
