Search for: All records

Tropical cyclones (e.g., hurricanes and tropical storms), are considered one of the world's most destructive climatological forces, causing substantial damage especially in urban areas. However, for some arid ecosystems, tropical cyclones represent natural disturbance events, providing important sources of fresh water that support ecosystem functioning. For subsistence populations living in these regions, it is unclear whether they experience these events negatively due to the associated damages or positively within a predictable disturbance regime. Here, we assess these phenomena with traditional ranchers from Baja California Sur, Mexico, following Hurricane Kay (September 2022). We find that despite significant damage caused by the hurricane, nearly the entire sample perceived this tropical cyclone event as a net positive on their lives. This traditional ranching population has a culture that is adapted to the seasonal tropical cyclone disturbance regime, and expects extreme rain events annually to support ecosystem functioning, and therefore their economic livelihoods. To these ranchers, the climate shock is not when the hurricanes come, but rather, when hurricanes do not come. We situate our results within a disturbance ecology framework, highlighting the role of increasing aridity and probability of drought in the North American Arid West. 

While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities—incorporating market integration—are associated with fertility in 10,250 women from 27 small-scale societies and found considerable variation in fertility. This variation did not align with group-level subsistence typologies. Societies labeled as “farmers” did not have higher fertility than others, while “foragers” did not have lower fertility. However, at the individual level, we found strong evidence that fertility was positively associated with farming and moderate evidence of a negative relationship between foraging and fertility. Markers of market integration were strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Despite strong cross-cultural evidence, these relationships were not consistent in all populations, highlighting the importance of the socioecological context, which likely influences the diverse mechanisms driving the relationship between fertility and subsistence.