What is it about?

That young Cape Rockjumpers use more water to keep cool is a bad thing if you live in a water scarce environment. This paper looks at Cape Rockjumper physiology comparing adults and juveniles. While both had similar cooling efficiency, adults did this by lowering metabolism, while the youngsters basically panted more, thus loosing more water.

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Why is it important?

Cape Rockjumpers are a species in decline due to climate change: their range is delimited by warm temperatures, their physiology shows the greatest vulnerability to warm temperatures compared to other species from fynbos biome, and now we show that the juveniles can't take the heat either.

Perspectives

This was work carried out by Krista Oswald as part of her PhD at Blue Hill Nature Reserve. I spent time catching rockjumpers, maybe a bit of stats, but it was all her good work together with Ben Smit (now at Rhodes).

Dr Alan Tristram Kenneth Lee
University of Cape Town

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This page is a summary of: Comparison of physiological responses to high temperatures in juvenile and adult Cape Rockjumpers Chaetops frenatus, Ostrich, October 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.2989/00306525.2018.1509905.
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