Denali field notes: A hare of another color

Up until the last few weeks, spotting snowshoe hares before they darted out from the adjacent vegetation was something I considered myself fairly lucky to do.  After all, it’s literally a matter of life and death for them to remain as undetected as possible.  As September came to a close, however, I found myself spotting them more often and from further away than I had previously, and not just from weeks of practice.  Their concealment was being betrayed by the very mechanisms designed to keep them safe.

There aren’t a lot of animals that call Denali home all year long, but those that do need effective strategies for staying alive during the essentially 8 months long winter.  For Denali’s snowshoe hares, one of these strategies is to adapt in an entirely new winter outfit, something only 20 other animals in the northern hemisphere do.¹ While in the summer they are a mottled reddish brown, starting around late September the hares grow in their nearly all white coats. The ears are typically the first to change, with the rest of the body following suit shortly thereafter.

This transformation is mediated by changes in the photoperiod that affect melanin production.  Although the full explanation is quite complex, the core mechanism is that the shorter day length increases the hormone melatonin, which suppress the melanin producing hormone prolactin.¹

While this strategy is good one for long winters blanketed in snow, changes in snow regimes are making this transition more precarious.  Camouflage mismatch–which is generally considered when more than 60% of the coat is different from the surrounding environment–can result either from winter coats that have come in too early, before the snow arrives, or because the snow pack lingers inconsistently.  This year, the lower elevations of the park have yet to see so much as a flake of snow, though you wouldn’t know that by looking at the hares.  As I have already experienced, such mismatch makes hares considerably easier to detect, a big problem for basically everyone’s favorite winter meal.²

Although hares can adjust the timing of their molts to a small extent, it won’t be enough to keep them in sync with the more dramatic shifts climate change has in store for the future.  This is especially problematic because hares don’t seem to be very aware of their mismatch and attempt to compensate behaviorally by say, hiding behind vegetation or choosing resting spots that more closely match their color.³ Other animals, particularly birds, seem better at this.  Rock ptarmigan for example will actually dirty themselves to more closely match patchy snow.⁴

Given the immense selection pressure on these animals to match their environment and the high variation in the traits responsible for such color changes, it’s possible that hares will be able to keep pace with an already changing arctic landscape, but we don’t know for sure.  The alternative will be to add hares to the growing list of once common animals that now require invasive management strategies to stay afloat in the anthroproscene.

Literature cited

1. Zimova M, Hackländer K, Good JM, Melo-Ferreira J, Alves PC, Mills SL. (2018). Function and underlying mechanisms of seasonal colour moulting in mammals and birds: what keeps them changing in a warming world? Biol. Rev. 93: 1478 – 1498.1478 doi: 10.1111/brv.12405

2. Pedersen S, Odden M, Pedersen HC. (2017). Climate change induced molting mismatch? Mountain hare abundance reduced by duration of snow cover and predator abundance. Ecosphere 8: 01722

3. Zimova M, Mills SL, Lukacs PM, Mitchell MS. (2014). Snowshoe hares display limited phenotypic plasticity to mismatch in seasonal camouflage. Proc. R. Soc. B 2014 281 20140029; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0029

4. Montgomerie R, Lyon B, Holder K. (2001) Dirty ptarmigan: behavioral modification of conspicuous male plumage, Behavioral Ecology 12: 429–438.