Sub-critical limits are viable alternatives to critical thermal limits.

Autor: Braschler B; Section of Conservation Biology, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, St. Johanns-Vorstadt 10, CH-4056, Basel, Switzerland; DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology, Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland, 7602, South Africa., Chown SL; School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Victoria, 3800, Australia., Duffy GA; School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Victoria, 3800, Australia. Electronic address: grant.duffy@monash.edu.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Journal of thermal biology [J Therm Biol] 2021 Oct; Vol. 101, pp. 103106. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Sep 22.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtherbio.2021.103106
Abstrakt: Thermal traits are frequently used to explain variation in species distributions, abundance, and sensitivity to climate change. Due to their utility and ease of measurement, critical thermal limits in particular have proliferated across the ecophysiological literature. Critical limit assays can, however, have deleterious or even lethal effects on individuals and there is growing recognition that intermediate metrics of performance can provide a further, nuanced understanding of how species interact with their environments. Meanwhile, the scarcity of data describing sub-critical or voluntary limits, which have been proposed as alternatives to critical limits and can be collected under less extreme conditions, reduces their value in comparative analyses and broad-scale syntheses. To overcome these limitations and determine if sub-critical limits are viable proxies for upper and lower critical thermal limits we measured and compared the critical and sub-critical thermal limits of 2023 ants representing 51 species. Sub-critical limits in isolation were a satisfactory linear predictor for both individual and species critical limits and when species identity was also considered there were substantial gains in variance explained. These gains indicate that a species-specific conversion factor can further improve estimates of critical traits using sub-critical proxies. Sub-critical limits can, therefore, be integrated into broader syntheses of critical limits and confidently used to calculate common ecological metrics, such as warming tolerance, so long as uncertainty in estimates is explicitly acknowledged. Although lower thermal traits exhibited more variation than their upper counterparts, the stronger phylogenetic signal of lower thermal traits indicates that appropriate conversions for lower thermal traits can be inferred from congenerics or other closely related taxa.
(Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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