Can we improve our ability to identify climate vulnerability in ectotherm life cycles?
Abstract The capacity of ectotherms to adjust their thermal tolerance limits through evolution or acclimation seems relatively modest and highly variable, and we lack satisfying explanations for both findings given a limited understanding of what ultimately determines an organism’s thermal tolerance. Here, we test if the amount of heating an ectotherm tolerates throughout a heating event until organismal failure scales with temperature’s non-linear influence on biological rates. To account for the non-linear influence of temperature on biological rates on heating tolerance, we rescaled the duration of heating events of 316 ectothermic taxa acclimated to different temperatures and describe the biological rate-corrected heating duration.
Abstract Comparative analyses have a long history of macro-ecological and -evolutionary approaches to understand structure, function, mechanism, and constraint. As the pace of science accelerates, there is ever-increasing access to diverse types of data and open-access databases that are enabling and inspiring new research. Whether conducting a species-level trait-based analysis or a formal meta-analysis of study effect sizes, comparative approaches share a common reliance on reliable, carefully-curated databases. Unlike many scientific endeavors, building a database is a process that many researchers undertake infrequently and in which we are not formally trained.
Ectotherm heat limits track biological rates
Temperature affects biological processes on many levels of biological organisation