Journal ArticleDOI
Climatic variability and the evolution of insect freeze tolerance.
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TLDR
The climates of the two hemispheres have led to the parallel evolution of freeze tolerance for very different reasons, and this hemispheric difference is symptomatic of many wide‐scale disparities in Northern and Southern ecological processes.Abstract:
Insects may survive subzero temperatures by two general strategies: Freeze-tolerant insects withstand the formation of internal ice, while freeze-avoiding insects die upon freezing. While it is widely recognized that these represent alternative strategies to survive low temperatures, and mechanistic understanding of the physical and molecular process of cold tolerance are becoming well elucidated, the reasons why one strategy or the other is adopted remain unclear. Freeze avoidance is clearly basal within the arthropod lineages, and it seems that freeze tolerance has evolved convergently at least six times among the insects (in the Blattaria, Orthoptera, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera and Lepidoptera). Of the pterygote insect species whose cold-tolerance strategy has been reported in the literature, 29% (69 of 241 species studied) of those in the Northern Hemisphere, whereas 85 % (11 of 13 species) in the Southern Hemisphere exhibit freeze tolerance. A randomization test indicates that this predominance of freeze tolerance in the Southern Hemisphere is too great to be due to chance, and there is no evidence of a recent publication bias in favour of new reports of freeze-tolerant species. We conclude from this that the specific nature of cold insect habitats in the Southern Hemisphere, which are characterized by oceanic influence and climate variability must lead to strong selection in favour of freeze tolerance in this hemisphere. We envisage two main scenarios where it would prove advantageous for insects to be freeze tolerant. In the first, characteristic of cold continental habitats of the Northern Hemisphere, freeze tolerance allows insects to survive very low temperatures for long periods of time, and to avoid desiccation. These responses tend to be strongly seasonal, and insects in these habitats are only freeze tolerant for the overwintering period. By contrast, in mild and unpredictable environments, characteristic of habitats influenced by the Southern Ocean, freeze tolerance allows insects which habitually have ice nucleators in their guts to survive summer cold snaps, and to take advantage of mild winter periods without the need for extensive seasonal cold hardening. Thus, we conclude that the climates of the two hemispheres have led to the parallel evolution of freeze tolerance for very different reasons, and that this hemispheric difference is symptomatic of many wide-scale disparities in Northern and Southern ecological processes.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Upper thermal limits in terrestrial ectotherms: how constrained are they?
TL;DR: Findings point to many terrestrial ectotherms having a limited potential to change their thermal limits particularly within the context of an average predicted temperature increase of 2–4 °C for mid-latitude populations over the next few decades.
Book ChapterDOI
Physiological Diversity in Insects: Ecological and Evolutionary Contexts.
TL;DR: The chapter considers the question of what lessons insect evolutionary physiologists might have to offer ecology and conservation biology, and how evolutionary physiology can offer ecologists a set of useful general rules in some cases and can unveil the nature of local contingency in others.
Journal ArticleDOI
Insect thermal tolerance: what is the role of ontogeny, ageing and senescence?
Ken Bowler,John S. Terblanche +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that basal thermal tolerance and acclimation responses (i.e. phenotypic plasticity) are strongly influenced by age and/or ontogeny and may confound studies of temperature responses if unaccounted for and that the temperature tolerance of insects should be defined within the age‐demographics of a particular population or species.
Journal ArticleDOI
Insects at low temperatures: an ecological perspective
TL;DR: In insects, it is not only changes in mean environmental temperature and growing season length that are important, but also their responses to environmental extremes as discussed by the authors, with extremes of temperature, rates of temperature change, the numbers of freeze-thaw transitions, climatic unpredictability and the state of the surrounding microhabitat being important factors determining the cold tolerance strategy adopted by an insect.
Journal ArticleDOI
Environmental constraints on life histories in Antarctic ecosystems: tempos, timings and predictability.
TL;DR: It is shown that the timing and extent of resource availability, from nutrients to colonisable space, differ across Antarctic marine, intertidal and terrestrial habitats, and illustrated that these differences affect the rate at which organisms function.
References
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Book
Species Diversity in Space and Time
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a hierarchical dynamic puzzle to understand the relationship between habitat diversity and species diversity and the evolution of the relationships between habitats diversity and diversity in evolutionary time.
Journal ArticleDOI
Poleward shifts in geographical ranges of butterfly species associated with regional warming
Camille Parmesan,Nils Ryrholm,Constantí Stefanescu,Jane K. Hill,Chris D. Thomas,Henri Descimon,Brian Huntley,Lauri Kaila,Jaakko Kullberg,Toomas Tammaru,W. John Tennent,Jeremy A. Thomas,Martin Warren +12 more
TL;DR: The authors showed that migratory species can respond rapidly to yearly climate variation, and further global warming is predicted to continue for the next 50-100 years, and some migratory animals can respond quickly to climate variation.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Latitudinal Gradient in Geographical Range: How so Many Species Coexist in the Tropics
TL;DR: It is suggested that the greater annual range of climatic conditions to which individuals in high-latitudes environments are exposed relative to what low-latitude organisms face has favored the evolution of broad climatic tolerances in high -latitude species.
Book
Temperature Biology of Animals
Andrew R. Cossins,Ken Bowler +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the physiology, biochemistry, and general biology of animals are discussed, and a review of the most relevant papers can be found in Section 5.2.1.