Global analysis of thermal tolerance and latitude in ectotherms

By Jennifer M. Sunday, A. E. Bates, N. Dulvy. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences, 2011

1,272 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A tenet of macroecology is that physiological processes of organisms are linked to large-scale geographical patterns in environmental conditions. Species at higher latitudes experience greater seasonal temperature variation and are consequently predicted to withstand greater temperature extremes. We tested for relationships between breadths of thermal tolerance in ectothermic animals and the latitude of specimen location using all available data, while accounting for habitat, hemisphere, methodological differences and taxonomic affinity. We found that thermal tolerance breadths generally increase with latitude, and do so at a greater rate in the Northern Hemisphere. In terrestrial ectotherms, upper thermal limits vary little while lower thermal limits decrease with latitude. By contrast, marine species display a coherent poleward decrease in both upper and lower thermal limits. Our findings provide comprehensive global support for hypotheses generated from studies at smaller taxonomic subsets and geographical scales. Our results further indicate differences between terrestrial and marine ectotherms in how thermal physiology varies with latitude that may relate to the degree of temperature variability experienced on land and in the ocean.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/735ce172db8011573d9aa8b836d9acdfe150eccc

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Citations in the corpus

Thermal-safety margins and the necessity of thermoregulatory behavior across latitude and elevation (2014, positive): “We start by expanding a global, empirical dataset on physiological heat and cold tolerance limits in amphibians, reptiles, and insects from diverse latitudes and elevations (22).”
Predicting organismal vulnerability to climate warming: roles of behaviour, physiology and adaptation (2012, background): “Interestingly, the increased tolerance range at high latitude consistently results from a much greater shift in CT min than in CT max [37,68,74,76,77,79], probably because minimum yearly (ambient) temperatures drop rapidly with latitude, whereas maximum yearly temperatures are relatively…”
Do growing degree days predict phenology across butterfly species (2015, background): “…have a minimum threshold (Dmin) of 11.58C and a maximum threshold (Dmax) of 338C (Zalucki 1982), although, as a migrant species of tropical origin, this is likely a warmer range than might be seen for resident species in temperate Ohio, especially for the lower thermal limit (Sunday et al. 2011).”
Distributional migrations, expansions, and contractions of tropical plant species as revealed in dated herbarium records (2012, background): “…species are tropical and the fact that tropical species are predicted to be especially sensitive to climate change as they generally have narrow niches due to climatic stability and specialization (Janzen, 1967; Ghalambor et al., 2006; Deutsch et al., 2008; McCain, 2009; Sunday et al., 2010).”
Climatic niche conservatism and the evolutionary dynamics in species range boundaries: global congruence across mammals and amphibians (2011, result): “Our results agree with a recent meta-analysis of experimental evidence (Sunday et al., 2011) that showed that thermal tolerance breadth in terrestrial ectotherms – including amphibians – indeed changes latitudinally, mostly as a result of increasing cold tolerance in northern temperate regions.”
Abiotic and biotic constraints across reptile and amphibian ranges (2016, background): “Th e close association between climate and distribution is especially apparent in ecototherms due to the tight link between environmental and body temperatures (Brattstrom 1968, Buckley and Jetz 2007, Sunday et al. 2011, 2012).”