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More than 3000 flying foxes dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps.
While humans debate at UN climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature.
Most plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve.
"A hell of a lot of species are in big trouble," said Stephen Williams, the director of the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change at James Cook University in Australia.
"I don't think there is any doubt we will see a lot of [extinctions]," he said.
Globally, 30 per cent of the Earth's species could disappear if temperatures rise 2.5C - and up to 70 per cent if they rise 3.5,C a UN network of scientists reported last month.
It wouldn't be the first time. There have been five major extinctions in the past 520 million years, and four of them have been linked to warmer tropical seas, according to a study published last month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British scientific journal.
The hardest hit will include plants and animals in colder climates or at higher elevations and those with limited ranges or little tolerance for temperature change, said Wendy Foden, a conservation biologist with the World Conservation Union, which catalogues threatened species.
Butterflies that lived at high altitudes in North America and southern France have vanished, and polar bears and penguins are watching their habitat melt away.
More than 3500 grey-headed and black flying foxes - huge bats - died in 2002 after temperatures rose above 42C in New South Wales, according to a report published last week in the Royal Society B journal.
- AP
