From BDN.com:
Roadkill is part of the routine for highway crews in northern Illinois, but the dead armadillo spotted along a Will County road was a bit of a surprise.
Armadillos are normally found in warmer areas in the South.
Homer Township highway crew member Dan Bills found the armadillo while doing road maintenance last week. Bills tells the (Tinley Park) SouthtownStar he’d seen armadillos while visiting Texas but was shocked to find one in suburban Chicago.
David Robinson works for the Will County Forest Preserve, and he says he wonders if the armadillo had some “human assistance” getting so far north.
Wildlife biologist Joe Rogus also says he’s never heard of any armadillo sightings in the area. He says armadillos are expanding their territory but aren’t capable of traveling long distances.
In case you didn’t know, nine-banded armadillos are going to colonize much of the US and possibly parts of Canada. It’s just a matter of time.
I’m sure that Illinois doesn’t have very strict laws regarding the “harvest” of armadillos. So it’s likely someone caught in Downstate Illinois, where they are now well-established, and brought it up to outskirts of the Windy City.
One of the ways coyotes spread east so rapidly is that people were intentionally introducing them as a game animal or as pets. Breeding coydogs and selling them as a new breed isn’t a new thing. I know that sounds weird, but in the days before there were strict wildlife ownership and transportation laws, it wasn’t unusual for people to trap coyotes and bring them into areas where there would be foxhound trials. A coyote is much more challenging animal to chase than a red fox, and many hound enthusiasts liked to see what their dogs could do in pursuit of a very big fox that might turn and fight back.
Amardillos are slowly colonizing the US, just as the Virginia opossum did. In the old days, the experts of the day would say that opossums won’t make north of Virginia. Then it was “north of the National Road” (US 40). Then it was Canada. Now, I think Montreal and Minneapolis are the official northern limits of the Virginia possum range.
I don’t think Armadillos will get that far north– unless there is a mutation in armadillos that causes them to grow actual pelts.
But they won’t be confined to the subtropical parts of the country.
One can bet on that.
They already have colonized southern Nebraska.
It gets very cold there in winter– much more so than it does in coastal New York or New England.
They are coming.
Slowly but surely– but they are.
I guess the plus side is that they eat grubs and other insects like ants and termites…
Not unexpected, they have expanded their range a lot in the last 25 years, though much of that was supposed to go eastward from Texas across LA, MS & AL into the FL panhandle.
Call climate change what you will but don’t be surprised when you see some different species.
Climate change plus the simple fact that these things are evolving adaptations to much colder climates.
Evolution is interesting in this species, too, because all nine-banded armadillos are born in litters of four genetically identical offspring. When a dog has four pups in a litter, they aren’t clones of each other. So there isn’t nearly the genetic variation in nine-banded armadillos as there is in other vertebrates.
But they have enough variation to have evolved to fit a wide range. The southern terminus of the range is Uruguay, which is also has a temperate climate.
I meant in other species (plants or animals) moving into an
area where they had not previously lived. Species territorial expansion into new areas.
The quadruplets make the investigation of genetic variation even more interesting.
Global warming? Armadillos are spreading faster than other creatures with similar historical ranges because, bored truckers with a juvenile sense of humor love to prank each other by stashing dead armadillos in each others cabs, then laughing like hell at the next truck stop when the poor mark describes how he discovered the disgusting prize.
Sometimes the armadillos are not quite dead, and get thrown out a window when they wake up and start rooting around under the seat.
This is testable.
Go to eastern North Carolina or southeastern Oklahoma. Catch a baby alligator. Take to Ohio and turn it loose.
See if it lasts a year. It won’t. Even those northernmost alligators can’t survive a real winter.
The climate is indeed changing. The debate is the mechanism of the change and to which extent humans are responsible for it or if we can make adjustments to these changes. Most peer-reviewed studies clearly show that it’s the result of CO2 in the atmosphere.
There is no real scientific debate on those facts.
That conspiracy theory that is promulgated on rightists websites– that the scientist hid data– has been thoroughly debunked.
This will answer all your questions.
http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics
This guy has several videos on what the actual debate is.
Al Gore and Rush Limbaugh don’t have a clue.
And the politicians have prevented far too many people from understanding what the science actually is.
No, I totally agree that the the world has gotten a little warmer, will probably continue to get warmer, and it’s likely our fault.
But you’ll be dead and i’ll be dead when the science is settled.
The problem comes when people really want to convince other people that the phenomenon is real. They go around looking for proof during a period of years or decades, not centuries.
So you ignore Occam’s razor, and see a single dead Armadillo in Chicago, as further evidence that the climate in IL is approaching that of TX.
I prefer to concentrate my conservation energies on preserving/promoting rural land and native species, as opposed to hoping that the Chinese and Indians will curtail their development over the next century and fuel their growth differently than Europeans fueled theirs during the last century.
The only meaningful and effective routes to combat warming (not like buying a Prius) require a white paternalism and a “do as we say, not as we did” attitude toward the developing world that i’m not comfortable with. No matter what we do, we (US/EU) will not have the money to be the big polluters over the next 100 years, even if we tried.
I question whether it will be the end of the world and the various Al Gore doomsday scenarios.
Actually, I think we could do something: Not drive a prius.
But begin to convert to natural gas as our energy source.
We have plenty of it. I sit on top of a ton of it. It has lower carbon emissions, too.
And all of those nasty countries that have oil won’t be so in control of us anymore.
Of course, there are the tar sands in Canada, and that oil will give those various dictators and potentates a run for their money.
So you’ve attacked our shrinking piece of the pie, but what do you tell the 2 billion Asians (whose economies are growing like crazy) who want to trade their bicycles and mopeds in for cars, and maybe ride a commercial jet someday? Or the Chinese villiage that wants to build their first coal fired power plant?
Sorry, Mr. Xiang, that path to prosperity is not good for the earth’s climate. Your bike and water bucket is healther, anyway.
Real idealouges cant seem to comprehend a pie chart or a simple time series graph. If they really cared about the earth’s climate, they would sterilize themselves, and hope for a worldwide plauge. (i.e. Think global, act local).
I don’t know if China can continue as it does.
I hold some skepticism that they will be the superpower. They may pass us in 2016, but I question whether they have the ability to do what we did.
One thing that we always had going for us– and still kind of do– is that talented people want to live here. We have political freedoms they don’t have and we do have better higher education than they do. (The other parts of the educational system– not so. A systemic problem we have worldwide).
Further, China doesn’t have the legal structure– and those that do exist are flimsy– to maintain an advanced free market economy. I don’t think their contract law is anywhere near as solid as ours is.
Remember that during the 30’s, the Soviet Union was growing even faster than China is now. What’s the Soviet Union running now?
Growth alone doesn’t pick your superpower. It’s important, but I don’t know if China can last as it does. A single party dictatorship with a growing middle class. And any political disruption in China coming from that will cause even more problems in their economy than the Middle Eastern disruptions are destroying theirs. History shows that whenever you have a growing middle class there are desires for more political freedom– and this occurs across cultures. Japan has the European corporatist bargaining model and has had the structure since the Meiji period.
BTW, Terrerman has done what you describe.
I don’t think we can save it all. But we can leave some of it. There are no clean realistic energy sources (at least right now).
And to close it, I don’t think polar bears will go extinct because of this. Polar bears are just a modified form of brown bear, and as they are forced to move away from the vanishing sea ice, they will simply be reabsorbed into the brown bear populations.
That’s evolution.
You’re probably right. But I think its just as likely that we are f*cked in the next 30 years moreso than the Chinese.
This all reminds me I need to pull the trigger and finally buy some arable land with water onsite and a tractor somewhere in Scandanavia. What to you think, Finland or Norway?
Norway has some good arable land in the fjord country.
Finnish has some good flat land, but the language is hard to learn.
I’d try Minnesota. That’s an easier Scandinavian country to move to.