Giant pandas eat bamboo at Chongqing Zoo in China on May 3, 2024. Costfoto / NurPhoto via Getty Images More than a third of animals on Earth are herbivores , but since plants don’t have a lot of calories it can be hard for grazers to eat enough to meet their energy needs. To add to the problem, climate change is lowering the nutritional value of certain foods that these plant eaters rely on. Fossil fuel emissions produced by humans are causing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to rise, pushing up temperatures worldwide . This is causing plants to grow faster in ecosystems across the globe, research biologist Ellen Welti with the Smithsonian Institution’s Great Plains Science Program wrote in The Conversation. “Some studies suggest that this ‘greening of the Earth’ could partially offset rising greenhouse gas emissions by storing more carbon in plants . However, there’s a trade-off: These fast-tracked plants can contain fewer nutrients per bite,” Welti wrote in The Conversation. Welti and colleagues looked at the ways in which nutrient dilution might impact species throughout the food web. They focused on the responses of plant-feeding populations, from giant pandas to grasshoppers. A common cockchafer / May bug feeds on an oak leaf. Arterra / Universal Images Group via Getty Images “When we look at future climate change, it’s not the same as the current hot years that we experience,” said Alex Ruane , co-director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies’ Climate Impacts Group. “If we were to find a location and look at a hot year that was recently experienced, it would likely have been a heat wave that would have raised the overall temperature. Climate change is different. Climate change is every day, a little bit more and more. When those heat waves come […]