Rising temperatures are driving pika populations extinct, according to a study. The American pika is a rabbit-like furry animal that lives in the mountains of the American West, and it is disappearing in California.

Researchers found that pikas are no longer found in 15 percent of theur California range, places that are on average 2.2 degrees warmer than places where they can still be found. The researchers predicted that by 2070, pikas would have disappeared from nearly 40 to 90 per cent of those sites, depending on how much summer temperatures rises.

The study was published in the Journal of Biogeography and led by Joseph Stewart, a graduate student at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Pikas have thick fur even inside their ears and the bottoms of their feet. They are thus adapted to cold temperatures in high elevation boulder fields and alpine meadows. They don’t hibernate and maintain a high body temperature to survive the winter, for which they prepare by harvesting grasses in summer.

The pikas are disappearing from the lower elevations where hikers usually spot them carrying flowers in their mouths. Hot summer temperatures force pikas underground to hide from the heat, giving them less time to forage for food. Spending as many as six hours in 78 degrees can prove fatal for them. Rising temperatures also threaten the animal by altering the types of plants in the shrinking alpine meadows and melting snowpacks which insulate their burrows.

Three pika communities near Crater Lake in Oregon have vanished in recent decades, according to the National Park Service. Trapped on isolated slopes, the pika can’t adapt and migrate like other animals. While a bird can just fly to a cooler place, a pika has to come down to lower elevation areas from its mountain peak if it wants to migrate.

The California Fish and Game Commission and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service denied petitions to list pikas under the state and federal endangered species acts since the pika isn’t threatened in the near future.

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