Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Mar;91(3):655-667.
doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.13653. Epub 2022 Jan 17.

Thermal tolerance in Drosophila: Repercussions for distribution, community coexistence and responses to climate change

José M Alruiz  1 , Ignacio Peralta-Maraver  2   3 , Francisco Bozinovic  1 , Mauro Santos  4 , Enrico L Rezende  1
Affiliations

Thermal tolerance in Drosophila: Repercussions for distribution, community coexistence and responses to climate change

José M Alruiz et al. J Anim Ecol. 2022 Mar.

Abstract

Here we combined controlled experiments and field surveys to determine if estimates of heat tolerance predict distributional ranges and phenology of different Drosophila species in southern South America. We contrasted thermal death time curves, which consider both magnitude and duration of the challenge to estimate heat tolerance, against the thermal range where populations are viable based on field surveys in an 8-year longitudinal study. We observed a strong correspondence of the physiological limits, the thermal niche for population growth, and the geographic ranges across studied species, which suggests that the thermal biology of different species provides a common currency to understand how species will respond to warming temperatures both at a local level and throughout their distribution range. Our approach represents a novel analytical toolbox to anticipate how natural communities of ectothermic organisms will respond to global warming.

Keywords: Drosophila; biogeography; critical thermal limits; global warming; population growth rate; thermal death time curves; thermal niche model.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

REFERENCES

    1. Addo-Bediako, A., Chown, S. L., & Gaston, K. J. (2000). Thermal tolerance, climatic variability and latitude. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 267(1445), 739-745. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2000.1065
    1. Alruiz, J. M., Peralta-Maraver, I., Bozinovic, F., Santos, M., & Rezende, E. L. (2021). Data from: Thermal tolerance in Drosophila: Repercussions for distribution, community coexistence and responses to climate change. Dryad Digital Repository, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w0vt4b8t4
    1. Anderson, R. P., Peterson, A. T., & Gomez-Laverde, M. (2002). Using niche-based GIS modeling to test geographic predictions of competitive exclusion and competitive release in South American pocket mice. Oikos, 98, 3-16. https://doi.org/10.1034/j.1600-0706.2002.t01-1-980116.x
    1. Andrewartha, H. G., & Birch, L. C. (1954). The distribution and abundance of animals. University of Chicago Press.
    1. Angilletta Jr., M. J., & Sears, M. W. (2011). Coordinating theoretical and empirical efforts to understand the linkages between organisms and environments. Integrative and Comparative Biology, 51(5), 653-661.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources