The world might become a buggier place thanks to global warming, presenting farmers with new worries, according to a study published today in Science magazine. Paleobiologists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History studied fossil evidence of insect damage on plants in prehistoric Wyoming and found that insect population and appetite surged as temperatures warmed 13 degrees Fahrenheit over 3 million years, from 56 to 53 million years ago. Researcher Peter Wilf cautioned that the trends studied might not hold lessons for current global warming, especially given its rapid pace. But he added, “All we can say is that climate change affects species and affects them in a big way.”
