++Many birds, mammals, and fish seem to get smaller as the temperature rises. +
++This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis. +
++One fall morning in 1978, David Willard, an ornithologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, walked to nearby McCormick Place convention center — a hulking structure along Lake Michigan — to look for dead birds. He’d received a tip that birds were crashing into the building’s many windows on their journey south. +
++He found a few birds lifeless on the concrete that morning. And as any good scientist might do, he brought them back to the museum to measure them and store the winged creatures in the museum’s collection. His curiosity piqued, he returned to McCormick Place the next morning. He found still more birds and brought them, too, back to the museum. +
++Four decades later, Willard has helped collect more than 100,000 birds from window collisions in Chicago, with help from other scientists and volunteers. They now make up a stunning 20 percent of the museum’s ornithology collection. +
++While these birds represent a tragic loss of life, they’ve also helped reveal fascinating insights into how wildlife is changing. One especially striking finding from the collection is that these birds have been shrinking — and rising global temperatures are likely to blame, according to a 2019 analysis of Willard’s measurements. +
++It’s not just birds. A growing body of research suggests that global warming is messing with the body sizes of all kinds of creatures, from cold-blooded frogs to warm-bodied mammals, and often making animals smaller. +
++Wild animals are already facing a wide range of threats. If they shrink — and especially if they shrink at different rates, as researchers predict — that could push some species even closer to extinction. And it could throw a wrench into ecosystems that humans rely on. +
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Curtesy of Kayleigh Kueffner/Field Museum
++The link between body size and temperature +
++We already know climate change will impact wildlife in a number of ways, from shifting the distribution of some species to altering the color of others. But it might be surprising to learn about changes in something as fundamental as body size. +
++In ecology, a principle called Bergmann’s rule suggests that individuals of a population of warm-blooded animals like birds or mammals will be larger in cooler climates and smaller in warmer ones. Intuitively, this makes sense: Larger individuals have an easier time conserving heat when it’s cold, and smaller animals have an easier time cooling off when it’s hot. This has to do with the ratio of an animal’s body size to its surface area. (It’s the same reason why a large ice cube melts relatively slower than a small one.) +
++The idea that warming is linked to smaller body sizes also bears out in fossil evidence. During the largest warming event in the early Eocene, about 56 million years ago — when temperatures increased between 5 to 8 degrees Celsius within 10,000 years — many animals got smaller, including mammals (which scientists learned by measuring fossilized teeth). Another past warming event called the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2, which saw temperatures increase by 3°C, was also associated with shrinking animals. +
++Scientists look to these warming periods to understand what the future might look like. If current warming continues, we can expect the planet to be 1.5°C warmer by 2040, compared to pre-industrial levels. And it will go up from there. “Reductions in body size in fossils,” two ecologists wrote in a 2011 perspective for Nature Climate Change, “are particularly informative of what we can expect in the coming century.” +
++Then again, nature is complicated and tends to surprise even the brightest minds. +
++Many animals are getting smaller, but it’s not a universal trend +
++In 2019, when scientists examined more than 70,000 bird specimens in the Field Museum collection, they found that individuals from 52 bird species shrank by an average of 2.6 percent between 1978 and 2016. A part of the birds’ legs, known as the tarsus, also got smaller, on average. +
++“We had no idea until two years ago that 52 of the most common, well-known species of North American bird have all gotten smaller over the last 40 years,” said Brian Weeks, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Michigan. “It has big implications for what’s going to happen in the future.” +
++Other studies on birds, deer, rodents, insects, and fish show similar patterns. Research in 2017, for example, found that the body size of a small, silver fish called menhaden, which is widely used for animal feed and bait, has shrunk on average by 15 percent over the last 65 years — most likely due to warming. “As the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans continue to warm, the future of menhaden, it seems, will be even smaller,” said R. Eugene Turner, the author of the study and a professor at Louisiana State University. +
++What’s interesting is that fish and other so-called ectotherms don’t generate their own heat, so having a smaller body doesn’t help them stay cool. Instead, they might shrink in response to warming for other reasons, said Jennifer Sheridan, assistant curator for amphibians and reptiles at Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the lead author of the 2011 perspective. Warm temperatures, for example, speed up the development phases of frogs, from egg to tadpole and so on, but their rate of growth doesn’t keep up, she said. As a result, they’re smaller by the time they arrive at adulthood. +
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University of British Columbia
++But while there are plenty of examples that fit this trend, there are also many exceptions — and a whole lot we still don’t know. +
++If Bergmann’s rule were truly universal, you’d expect individuals of a species’ population to be smaller in warmer parts of their range — smaller polar bears further south, say. But a 2017 analysis of more than 950 species of birds and mammals found that “most species had similar sizes regardless of the temperature of their environment.” +
++There’s even evidence that certain animals are getting larger, Sheridan said. It’s not totally clear how that happens, but one explanation is that warming holds back winter and extends the growing season, allowing animals that eat plants to bulk up. (Sheridan also said that museums with specimen collections are more commonly found in temperate, wealthier regions, which can create gaps in the data.) +
++The point is that natural systems are really complicated. Even if theory and lab research suggests that animals consistently shrink under warming, the exact result of climate change is messier in reality, she said. “It’s almost always the case that some are getting smaller and some are not,” Sheridan said. “With climate change, there are so many other factors changing at the same time.” +
++There are also unanswered questions about how, exactly, animals are shrinking. The big one is whether body-size changes result from natural selection — meaning, they’re passed down from one generation to the next — or occur within the lifetime of a single animal, which researchers call “plastic” changes. +
++What happens when animals miniaturize +
++These details aside, researchers are confident that global warming will mess with the size of animals and make many of them smaller. But is that a problem? +
++You could argue that Earth has been here before. It’s gone through major periods of warming, and many animals were able to adapt to drastic changes — birds, after all, evolved from dinosaurs millions of years ago, and there are some 10,000 to 18,000 species of them today. But then again, today is nothing like the Eocene. We’re warming the planet at an unprecedented rate — about 10 times faster than the average warming following historic ice ages — which means most animals have little time to adapt. “The idea that they’re going to happily evolve is an oversimplification,” Weeks said. +
++And to be clear: Shrinking comes at a cost. For many species, a smaller size translates to fewer babies, said Sheridan. “The fact that they’re smaller has implications for their future reproduction, which, in turn, has implications for population size,” she said. “This is one of the reasons why people care so much about body size.” +
++For some ectotherms, including amphibians, being small also makes you more likely to dry out during a drought. Body size has implications for species that have evolved specialized body types for long migrations. (Interestingly, the 2019 study on migratory birds found that their wings are actually getting longer, likely to compensate for their smaller body size, Weeks said.) +
++But perhaps more concerning is that warming will change body sizes in different ways for different species, said Sheridan, and that can screw up the relationships between animals. For example, if a predator shrinks more slowly than its prey, it might need more prey to fill its stomach in a warming world. +
++“If everything was getting smaller at the same rate, I don’t think it would be that big of a deal,” Sheridan said. There would still be consequences, she said, such as higher extinction risks for some species, but you would likely just have “a miniaturized ecosystem that is still functioning because all of the elements are still in proportion to one another.” It’s the mismatch, she said, that’s “extra worrisome.” +
++Debates about the role of warming in shrinking animals are ongoing. Sheridan, for one, is working on an update of her 2011 article that will include more data, and it includes more exceptions to the rule. And Weeks is working to understand, among other things, whether the changes in body size he observed in birds were produced through evolution or during their lives: “If you warm up birds while they’re developing, do they actually get smaller?” +
++Meanwhile, David Willard, now collections manager emeritus at the Field Museum, is still spending some of his time looking for birds. Lately, there haven’t been many to collect, he said, because the bright lights at the convention center that can attract and disorient birds have been off for much of the pandemic. That’s one bit of good news that has come out of his research: It’s possible to save the lives of birds just by turning off the lights. +
++
++The video app is causing products to blow up — and flame out — faster than ever. +
++A couple months ago, I was hunting for the holy grail. Somewhere within the chaotic aisles of a Target in the suburbs of Washington, DC, was a magic wand that would somehow transform my very short, very thin, very flat, and very blonde eyelashes into the lash equivalent of a mink coat. Granted, most mascara commercials promise as much, but this was different. I’d actually seen it happen, on TikTok. +
++The video went like this: A girl shows the vast difference between her normal eye and the one anointed with the mascara, then the video cuts to another user whose lashes curl up in the exact same impossible way. The second video acted as confirmation that it wasn’t all a prank, that These Are Not Paid Actors. It was, in other words, like a really good, really short infomercial. +
++The magic wand’s real name is the Maybelline Lash Sensational Sky High mascara, which comes in a rather demure rosy tube but otherwise looks exactly like the other 12 billion products in any makeup aisle. The only way I knew I’d arrived at the right place was when I came across a devastating scene: Two teenage girls staring at a single empty rack. +
++“It’s sold out,” one of them moaned, and I understood exactly what “it” was. +
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TikTok
++Here is an incomplete list of products that have become difficult or impossible to buy because of their popularity on TikTok: a mysterious cleaning paste called The Pink Stuff, a specific pair of Aerie leggings and a different pair of Zara jeans, Isle of Paradise tanning spray, Elf concealer, Dr. Jart Cicapair color corrector, Cat Crack catnip, the Prepdeck kitchen organizer, feta cheese (all-encompassing), and an Eos shaving cream that one user promised would “bless your fucking cooch.” My editor often laments that products by her longtime favorite low-cost skincare brand, CeraVe, are constantly sold out because of the company’s exploding popularity on TikTok. Last summer it was almost impossible to find roller skates due to a handful of viral videos of girls speeding through their hometowns. +
++There’s now so much stuff that’s gone viral on TikTok that people have opened stores dedicated to it: A 15-year-old student opened a store in his local mall called “Viral Trends NY,” which carries omnipresent TikTok doodads like Martinelli’s apple juice and Squishmallows stuffed animals. “Everything in this store is super high demand and you really can’t find it anywhere else except on eBay fully marked up,” he told a local news broadcast; a similar shop also exists in Indiana. Downtown Manhattan has its own “TikTok Block,” where two big TikTokers have opened shops with curated vintage clothing. There is now so much stuff that’s gone viral on TikTok that the factories producing those products have gotten on TikTok and now have a hand in making them go viral in the first place. +
++This is only the first chapter of the “TikTok made me buy it” phenomenon, referring to the culture of compelling product review videos and the many impossibly stylish people who flaunt their lifestyles on the platform. Though TikTok is still in the testing phase for its in-app shopping feature, its Chinese counterpart Douyin netted a whopping $26 billion of e-commerce transactions within its first year. Currently, TikTok allows certain creators and businesses in the UK and Indonesia to sell products within its TikTok Shop, though the feature doesn’t yet exist in the US. But it’s almost certainly coming. What effect that might have on American consumerism depends on whom you ask. +
++
+Say you’re a teenager — or anyone, really — who wants to get very famous, very fast. There are worse places to go than TikTok, the app responsible for the careers of thousands of previously unknown normal people who’ve built up enough of a following to land their own pages on the website Famous Birthdays. What TikTok has done to turn an enormous swath of human beings into microinfluencers, it has also done to the music industry, where many of the top songs currently on the Billboard charts are simply the ones that have gone TikTok viral most recently. Now, the same phenomenon is happening to stuff. +
++There are a few reasons why TikTok is so adept at blowing up one thing — a song, a beauty product, a trend, a person — very quickly and forgetting about it several days later. The first is its algorithm, which is unmatched at identifying what individual users want to see and serving them more of it, sprinkled with a well-calibrated dose of randomness. +
+&&
++The course of a viral video tends to go like this: TikTok shows it to a handful of people on their For You pages, and if those people engage with it, it’ll show a few more. Videos that break out tend to snowball quite quickly, often in a matter of hours or overnight. Videos that don’t — the vast, vast majority — peter out entirely. That means that when you open the app, what you’re seeing is the culmination of what everyone else has decided to like or engage with, yet, of course, orchestrated by the invisible hand of the ever-changing TikTok algorithm and the people who control it. +
++The other reason is TikTok’s 60-second time limit: People can watch many more TikToks in the amount of time that they could watch, say, a YouTube review. That also gives it a lower barrier of entry, welcoming more creators onto the platform: To run a YouTube channel, you need equipment and some level of expertise, whereas with TikTok, all you need is your phone. The ability to duet, stitch, and share sounds encourages TikTok’s remix culture, wherein videos can capitalize off of each other’s success. +
++The prevalence of building off of others’ work has been a boon for a certain type of content: the product test. It was in this sort of video that I was first introduced to the magic mascara, and it turned out that this is how the mascara went viral in the first place, by people reacting to the original video in order to confirm that yes, this mascara was actually magic. +
++But the first wasn’t quite as spontaneous. Jessica Eid, a 19-year-old at Arizona State, had joined TikTok last fall as a bet with her friends to see who could get the most views. Jessica, explaining the bet in her first TikTok, won. It was about a week later that a Maybelline publicist reached out, asking if they could send her their new mascara and if she’d make a video about what she thought about it. No money was offered. “I was like, ‘Of course, that’s Maybelline, they’re so cool!” Jessica told me. After the video blew up, Jessica says Maybelline paid her in a five-figure deal to use her video in marketing materials for six months. +
++Jessica is only one example of someone who went viral because they recommended a certain product. If the idea of “influencerhood” is someone who advises you how to spend your time and money by making a certain type of life look enviable, recommendation influencers are the ur-example. The internet is full of them — there are influencers devoted to recommending Madewell jeans, seasonal Trader Joe’s snacks, even cheese plate accouterments. Creators who’ve become adept at the skill of evangelizing have built it into wildly lucrative businesses. +
++22-year-old Mikayla Nogueira is one such influencer, who, like many people, joined TikTok in March of 2020. Within days, she’d found out that she’d been temporarily laid off from her job at the local Ulta beauty store and that she wouldn’t be able to finish her senior year of college in person. “I needed to find something to do with my time,” she told me. +
++That month, a particular transformation trend called the catfish challenge — wherein you show your face before and after putting on dramatic makeup — was popular. Mikayla’s first stab at the format blew up. “Once I went viral, I essentially said to myself, ‘Mikayla, this has been your dream your entire life, to teach the world beauty and talk about makeup. This is your moment,” she said. “So I started putting out videos every single day: reviews, tutorials, lifestyle videos, just to see what people would like.” +
++It turns out that the people really, really liked her product reviews, which were peppered with refreshing honesty and a thick Boston accent that endeared her to viewers. While her expertise at Ulta was in higher-end makeup, her audience begged her to incorporate more accessible products they could find at CVS or Walgreens. “A lot of the viral products we see are drugstore products,” she said. “Drugstore makeup is crushing it right now.” Some popular topics: foundation (“People are always looking for a good foundation”), self-tanner, and anything affordable that allows customers to at least be able to try it out themselves, even if they end up hating it. +
++“It’s this weird chain reaction,” she said, “One person puts a video up about how that product changed their skin, and then it goes a little bit viral and then everyone else starts buying it and stitching that video or doing their own review.” +
++That chain of events isn’t always positive. KVD Beauty’s Good Apple foundation was celebrated widely on TikTok until people began actually wearing it for a whole day and realizing that it left them with creased, oily faces after a few hours. “Then it started going viral for bad reasons, and that was kind of the end of it,” she said. Also, sometimes the advice is bad. “Vaseline went viral for like, slathering it all over your face. I thought that was a little bit weird because … not everyone should be doing that.” +
++++@mikaylanogueira + ++This honestly shouldn’t even exist… #makeup #beauty #ROMWEGetGraphic #makeupreview +
+♬ original sound - Mikayla Nogueira +
+After about six months on TikTok, Mikayla started receiving her first requests to endorse specific beauty brands. She’d review a product positively, then that video would go viral, then the brand would reach out, hoping to build a longer-lasting advertising partnership. For TikTokers, the first sponsorship offer is a huge milestone; today, she fields messages and emails from brands every day and sometimes coaches them on how TikTok works. She says 99 percent ask for promotion on TikTok versus Instagram. “TikTok is the viral platform, and brands want their product to sell out,” she said. I asked her about how much money she’d made in the past year. “I just finished filing my taxes,” she said. “It’s upwards of a million.” +
++According to the last hundred or so years of marketing research, people like Mikayla and platforms like TikTok are almost perfectly suited to sell you things. Unsurprisingly, shoppers tend to buy from brands, or in this case influencers, they deem trustworthy. On a platform like TikTok, where inauthenticity is rabidly sniffed out and policed, the most popular influencers tend to be the ones who ultimately feel like believable salespeople. TikTok operates similarly to traditional word-of-mouth marketing, widely considered the most effective selling strategy that exists. It also incorporates viral marketing, sometimes called “online word-of-mouth,” which allows information and ads to spread much farther. +
++People are spending more of their money on social platforms; the number of shoppers buying via social commerce grew by 25 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to an Insider Intelligence report. Not only does social media encourage conspicuous consumption, but social platforms have also tried to erase the friction between seeing a product online and actually pressing “purchase,” as my colleague Terry Nguyen has reported extensively. A model for what that could look like already exists in Asia, which already has sophisticated in-app shopping features. Yet American consumers seem to want something different from those in China, who tend to view shopping as a hobby. “We have a greater focus on entertainment and community, and allow viewers to build an emotional connection with the seller,” Danielle Li, the founder of the livestream shopping marketplace Popshop Live, told Nguyen. +
++TikTok is perfectly suited to build those emotional connections, thanks to its prevalence of front-facing camera videos that often feel as though you’re FaceTiming with a friend who happens to be really excited about something she just bought. With the brevity of a tweet, the intimacy of YouTube, and the ability to riff off of others’ content, there’s nowhere better to make a convincing pitch and have it reach a potential audience of millions. +
++++@skincarebyhyram + ++The Truth About Morphe Skin Care LINK IN BIO #skincarebyhyram #morphe #review +
+♬ original sound - Hyram +
+When Hyram Yarbro, a 25-year-old in Hawaii, started making online skincare content, he posted primarily on YouTube, criticizing the DIY and natural skincare experiments of celebrities and influencers that came across his feed and educating viewers on science-backed strategies to reduce skin sensitivity and irritation. When he moved to TikTok in March 2020, however, what stuck was product recommendations. +
++“On YouTube, it’s giving people the feeling that they’ve walked away from your content learning something pretty substantial,” he explained. “TikTok is more stripped away, because people want content that feels like you’re literally just hanging out with a friend.” He noticed that many of his followers seemed to feel directionless in their skincare routines, and his basic recommendations of affordable products from brands like The Ordinary and CeraVe amassed him a following of nearly 7 million. +
++Like Mikayla, he too has had a wildly successful year. Last summer, he told the New York Times he expected to become a multimillionaire within the year; though he wouldn’t confirm that he’d reached that goal, he told me he was excited about the prospect of getting involved in philanthropy and social causes. +
++
+Is TikTok really all that different from more traditional marketing tactics? Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at the Wharton School and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, reminded me that the internet didn’t invent the concept of sharing ideas. In his book, he notes six reasons why people share things, all of which seem to apply to TikTok, including sharing out of a desire for social currency and humans’ love of delivering useful information. “The underlying psychological drivers are pretty consistent over time, certain platforms may encourage one or another driver, but the drivers themselves don’t necessarily change,” he told me. +
++He also said that many more established brands have often been wary of virality. “Viral is often a flash in the pan; here today, gone tomorrow,” he said. “We don’t need 10 million people sharing our thing today and then talking about something completely different next week. We need them to continue talking about and sharing our stuff, whether online or off.” Another reason to be skeptical of virality, he says, is that if the main motivator for you to share something is solely to show that you were the first person in your group to discover it, that thing will be much more likely to die out quickly. “If it’s all about ‘I was here first,’ it’s not going to have as long of a lifespan.” +
++Much like products have had their viral moments on YouTube and Instagram that reflect the features of the platform — think LOL Surprise! Dolls, which relied on audience watch time as the toys were unwrapped to build suspense, or “the Amazon coat,” which spread on Instagram through a word-of-mouth influencer chain — TikTok’s main feature is its speed. That means TikTok products have a higher chance of being a flash in the pan rather than a long-term mainstay. When you look up Google search trends for many TikTok viral products — Maybelline Sky High mascara, KVD Good Apple foundation, Dr. Jart Cicapair, Squishmallows, and Cat Crack among them — you’ll see a huge spike, inevitably followed by a crash. +
++What platforms like TikTok and Instagram have allowed companies to do, however, is observe the kinds of conversations that might otherwise be private. Social listening, or the practice of brands checking in on social media discourse, has largely replaced the idea of the “focus group” that conjures images of Don Draper asking a group of women about their favorite lipstick. +
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