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Abstract Climate warming is predicted to increase mean temperatures and thermal extremes on a global scale. Because their body temperature depends on the environmental temperature, ectotherms bear the full brunt of climate warming. Predicting the impact of climate warming on ectotherm diversity and distributions requires a framework that can translate temperature effects on ectotherm life‐history traits into population‐ and community‐level outcomes. Here we present a mechanistic theoretical framework that can predict the fundamental thermal niche and climate envelope of ectotherm species based on how temperature affects the underlying life‐history traits. The advantage of this framework is twofold. First, it can translate temperature effects on the phenotypic traits of individual organisms to population‐level patterns observed in nature. Second, it can predict thermal niches and climate envelopes based solely on trait response data and, hence, completely independently of any population‐level information. We find that the temperature at which the intrinsic growth rate is maximized exceeds the temperature at which abundance is maximized under density‐dependent growth. As a result, the temperature at which a species will increase the fastest when rare is lower than the temperature at which it will recover from a perturbation the fastest when abundant. We test model predictions using data from a naturalized–invasive interaction to identify the temperatures at which the invasive can most easily invade the naturalized's habitat and the naturalized is most likely to resist the invasive. The framework is sufficiently mechanistic to yield reliable predictions for individual species and sufficiently broad to apply across a range of ectothermic taxa. This ability to predict the thermal niche before a species encounters a new thermal environment is essential to mitigating some of the major effects of climate change on ectotherm populations around the globe.
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The Evolution of Life History Traits and Their Thermal Plasticity in Daphnia
Few studies have explored the relative strength of ecogeographic versus lineage-specific effects on a global scale, particularly for poikilotherms, those organisms whose internal temperature varies with their environment. Here, we compile a global dataset of life history traits in Daphnia, at the species-and population-level, and use those data to parse the relative influences of lineage-specific effects and climate. We also compare the thermal response (plasticity) of life history traits and their dependence on climate, temperature, precipitation, and latitude. We found that the mode of evolution for life history traits varies but that the thermal response of life history traits most often follows a random walk model of evolution. We conclude that life history trait evolution in Daphnia is not strongly species-specific but is ecogeographically distinct, suggesting that life history evolution should be understood at the population level for Daphnia and possibly for other poikilotherms.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2102750
- PAR ID:
- 10495410
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Hydrobiology
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2673-9917
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 55 to 74
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrobiology2010005
