In the hills outside Missoula, Montana, wildlife biologists are looking at how climate change affects something very small: the snowshoe hare.
Life for snowshoe hares is pretty stressful-almost everything in the forest wants to eat them.
Alex Kumar, a graduate student at the University of Montana, lists the animals that are hungry for hares. “Lynx(山猫), foxes, coyotes(土狼),[… even] red squirrels(松鼠).”
Kumar and field technician Tucker Seitz spend months searching these woods for hares, often listening for signals from hares they’ve already put radio collars(项圈) on.
They catch other hares with wire traps(陷阱) about the size of a breadbox, with some apples as bait(诱饵). Most of the hares they track live less than a year—a hazard(风险) of being what Kumar calls “the cheeseburger of the ecosystem.”
But snowshoe hares have a special skill: camouflage. They’re brown during the summer, but turn white for the snowy winter months.
“There’re times when you’re tracking them and you know they’re really, really close, and you just can’t find them,” he says.
Hares switch color in the spring and fall in response to light, when the days get longer or shorter. But if the snow comes late, you get a white hare on brown ground.
“And they really think that they’re camouflaged, ” Kumar says. “They act like we can’t see them.”
Kumar calls this “mismatching”, and it’s becoming more of a concern with climate change.
“If the hares are consistently molting(脱毛)at the same time, year after year, and the snowfall comes later and melts earlier, there’s going to be more and more times when hares are mismatched,” he says.
Scott Mills of North Carolina State University leads the research. He says they’re finding that mismatched hares die at higher rates. That’s a concern for the threatened Canada lynx, which mainly eats these hares.
“It’s a very clear connection to a single climate change stressor,” Mills says.
Hares might be able to adapt over time. Some snowshoe hares in Washington State don’t turn white at all. Mills is trying to figure out whether hares and other wildlife can adapt as fast as the climate is changing.
“But how fast is too fast?” he asks.
24.Alex Kumar and his classmates catch snowshoe hares in order to find out .
A. the hares’ natural enemies
B. the influence of climate change on the hares’ lives
C. why the hares change fur colors regularly
D. how the ecosystem in the woods works
25.The word “camouflage” (Paragraph 6) is closest in meaning to .
A. hiding B. escaping C. fighting D. scaring
26.According to the passage, snowshoe hares can now be easily discovered by their enemies because they .
A. change their fur color to white too late
B. haven’t adapted to climate change
C. can no longer adapt to the change of light in spring and fall
D. find it more and more difficult to molt at the same time each year
27.Which best describes Mills’ tone in the passage?
A. Approving. B. Concerned. C. Enthusiastic. D. Doubtful.