Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Automated measurement of upper thermal limits in small aquatic animals.

ABSTRACT: We present a method for automating the measurement of upper thermal limits in small aquatic organisms. Upper thermal limits are frequently defined by the cessation of movement at high temperature, with measurement being performed by manual observation. Consequently, estimates of upper thermal limits may be subject to error and bias, both within and among observers. Our method utilises video-based tracking software to record the movement of individuals when exposed to high, lethal temperatures. We develop an algorithm in the R computing language that can objectively identify the loss of locomotory function from tracking data. Using independent experimental data, we validate our approach by demonstrating the expected response in upper thermal limits to acclimation temperature.

SUBMITTER: Burton T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6140313 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

Automated measurement of upper thermal limits in small aquatic animals.

Burton Tim T Zeis Bettina B Einum Sigurd S

The Journal of experimental biology 20180913 Pt 17

We present a method for automating the measurement of upper thermal limits in small aquatic organisms. Upper thermal limits are frequently defined by the cessation of movement at high temperature, with measurement being performed by manual observation. Consequently, estimates of upper thermal limits may be subject to error and bias, both within and among observers. Our method utilises video-based tracking software to record the movement of individuals when exposed to high, lethal temperatures. W ...[more]

PMID: 30012577

Similar Datasets

Pathogen exposure reduces sexual dimorphism in a host's upper thermal limits.

Project description:The climate is warming at an unprecedented rate, pushing many species toward and beyond the upper temperatures at which they can survive. Global change is also leading to dramatic shifts in the distribution of pathogens. As a result, upper thermal limits and susceptibility to infection should be key determinants of whether populations continue to persist, or instead go extinct. Within a population, however, individuals vary in both their resistance to both heat stress and infection, and their contributions to vital growth rates. No more so is this true than for males and females. Each sex often varies in their response to pathogen exposure, thermal tolerances, and particularly their influence on population growth, owing to the higher parental investment that females typically make in their offspring. To date, the interplay between host sex, infection, and upper thermal limits has been neglected. Here, we explore the response of male and female Daphnia to bacterial infection and static heat stress. We find that female Daphnia, when uninfected, are much more resistant to static heat stress than males, but that infection negates any advantage that females are afforded. We discuss how the capacity of a population to cope with multiple stressors may be underestimated unless both sexes are considered simultaneously.

| S-EPMC7713950 | biostudies-literature

Aridity and land use negatively influence a dominant species' upper critical thermal limits.

Project description:Understanding the physiological tolerances of ectotherms, such as thermal limits, is important in predicting biotic responses to climate change. However, it is even more important to examine these impacts alongside those from other landscape changes: such as the reduction of native vegetation cover, landscape fragmentation and changes in land use intensity (LUI). Here, we integrate the observed thermal limits of the dominant and ubiquitous meat ant Iridomyrmex purpureus across climate (aridity), land cover and land use gradients spanning 270 km in length and 840 m in altitude across northern New South Wales, Australia. Meat ants were chosen for study as they are ecosystem engineers and changes in their populations may result in a cascade of changes in the populations of other species. When we assessed critical thermal maximum temperatures (CTmax) of meat ants in relation to the environmental gradients we found little influence of climate (aridity) but that CTmax decreased as LUI increased. We found no overall correlation between CTmax and CTmin. We did however find that tolerance to warming was lower for ants sampled from more arid locations. Our findings suggest that as LUI and aridification increase, the physiological resilience of I. purpureus will decline. A reduction in physiological resilience may lead to a reduction in the ecosystem service provision that these populations provide throughout their distribution.

| S-EPMC6334740 | biostudies-literature

Upper thermal limits of Drosophila are linked to species distributions and strongly constrained phylogenetically.

Project description:Upper thermal limits vary less than lower limits among related species of terrestrial ectotherms. This pattern may reflect weak or uniform selection on upper limits, or alternatively tight evolutionary constraints. We investigated this issue in 94 Drosophila species from diverse climates and reared in a common environment to control for plastic effects that may confound species comparisons. We found substantial variation in upper thermal limits among species, negatively correlated with annual precipitation at the central point of their distribution and also with the interaction between precipitation and maximum temperature, showing that heat resistance is an important determinant of Drosophila species distributions. Species from hot and relatively dry regions had higher resistance, whereas resistance was uncorrelated with temperature in wetter regions. Using a suite of analyses we showed that phylogenetic signal in heat resistance reflects phylogenetic inertia rather than common selection pressures. Current species distributions are therefore more likely to reflect environmental sorting of lineages rather than local adaptation. Similar to previous studies, thermal safety margins were small at low latitudes, with safety margins smallest for species occupying both humid and dry tropical environments. Thus, species from a range of environments are likely to be at risk owing to climate change. Together these findings suggest that this group of insects is unlikely to buffer global change effects through marked evolutionary changes, highlighting the importance of facilitating range shifts for maintaining biodiversity.

| S-EPMC3479592 | biostudies-literature

How important is thermal history? Evidence for lasting effects of developmental temperature on upper thermal limits in Drosophila melanogaster.

Project description:A common practice in thermal biology is to take individuals directly from the field and estimate a range of thermal traits. These estimates are then used in studies aiming to understand broad scale distributional patterns, understanding and predicting the evolution of phenotypic plasticity, and generating predictions for climate change risk. However, the use of field-caught individuals in such studies ignores the fact that many traits are phenotypically plastic and will be influenced by the thermal history of the focal individuals. The current study aims to determine the extent to which estimates of upper thermal limits (CTmax), a frequently used measure for climate change risk, are sensitive to developmental and adult acclimation temperatures and whether these two forms of plasticity are reversible. Examining a temperate and tropical population of Drosophila melanogaster we show that developmental acclimation has a larger and more lasting effect on CTmax than adult acclimation. We also find evidence for an interaction between developmental and adult acclimation, particularly when flies are acclimated for a longer period, and that these effects can be population specific. These results suggest that thermal history can have lasting effects on estimates of CTmax. In addition, we provide evidence that developmental and/or adult acclimation are unlikely to contribute to substantial shifts in CTmax and that acclimation capacity may be constrained at higher temperatures.

| S-EPMC5454265 | biostudies-literature

The Janus of macrophysiology: stronger effects of evolutionary history, but weaker effects of climate on upper thermal limits are reversed for lower thermal limits in ants.

Project description:Species may exhibit similar traits via different mechanisms: environmental filtering and local adaptation (geography) and shared evolutionary history (phylogeny) can each contribute to the resemblance of traits among species. Parsing trait variation into geographic and phylogenetic sources is important, as each suggests different constraints on trait evolution. Here, we explore how phylogenetic distance, geographic distance, and geographic variation in climate shape physiological tolerance of high and low temperatures using a global dataset of ant thermal tolerances. We found generally strong roles for evolutionary history and geographic variation in temperature, but essentially no detectable effects of spatial proximity per se on either upper or lower thermal tolerance. When we compared the relative importance of the factors shaping upper and lower tolerances, we found a much stronger role for evolutionary history in shaping upper versus lower tolerance, and a moderately weaker role for geographic variation in temperature in shaping upper tolerance when compared with lower tolerance. Our results demonstrate how geographic variation in climate and evolutionary history may have differential effects on the upper and lower endpoints of physiological tolerance. This Janus effect, where the relative contributions of geographic variation in climate and evolutionary history are reversed for lower versus upper physiological tolerances, has gained some support in the literature, and our results for ant physiological tolerances provide further evidence of this pattern. As the climate continues to change, the high phylogenetic conservatism of upper tolerance may suggest potential constraints on the evolution of tolerance of high temperatures.

| S-EPMC5905527 | biostudies-literature

Reduction of visual stimulus artifacts using a spherical tank for small, aquatic animals.

Project description:Delivering appropriate stimuli remains a challenge in vision research, particularly for aquatic animals such as zebrafish. Due to the shape of the water tank and the associated optical paths of light rays, the stimulus can be subject to unwanted refraction or reflection artifacts, which may spoil the experiment and result in wrong conclusions. Here, we employ computer graphics simulations and calcium imaging in the zebrafish optic tectum to show, how a spherical glass container optically outperforms many previously used water containers, including Petri dish lids. We demonstrate that aquatic vision experiments suffering from total internal reflection artifacts at the water surface or at the flat container bottom may result in the erroneous detection of visual neurons with bipartite receptive fields and in the apparent absence of neurons selective for vertical motion. Our results and demonstrations will help aquatic vision neuroscientists on optimizing their stimulation setups.

| S-EPMC7864920 | biostudies-literature

Jumping dynamics of aquatic animals.

Project description:Jumping out of water is a phenomenon exhibited by a variety of aquatic and semi-aquatic animals. Yet, there is no common groundwork that clarifies the physical constraints required to jump out of water. In this study, we elucidate the physical conditions required for an animal to jump out of water. More than 100 jumps are analysed over five taxonomic groups. By balancing the power produced by animals with drag-induced dissipation, we expect that maximum jumping height, H, scales with body length, L, as H/ L ? L-1/3 ? Fr2, where the Froude number, Fr, is a ratio of inertia to gravity. To identify jumping regimes, simplified experiments are conducted by shooting axisymmetric bodies through the water surface. Here, we see a transition in which partial exits scale as H/ L ? Fr and complete exits scale as H/ L ? Fr2. A bioinspired robotic flapping mechanism was designed to mimic the fast motion of impulsive jumping animals. When exiting water, the robot carries a large volume of fluid referred to as an entrained mass. A theoretical model is developed to predict the jumping height of various water-exiting bodies, which shows that the mass of the entrained fluid relative to the mass of the body limits the maximum jumping height. We conclude that the lack of entrained fluid allows animals to reach extraordinary heights compared to our water-exiting robots.

| S-EPMC6451394 | biostudies-literature

Real-time measurement of small molecules directly in awake, ambulatory animals.

Project description:The development of a technology capable of tracking the levels of drugs, metabolites, and biomarkers in the body continuously and in real time would advance our understanding of health and our ability to detect and treat disease. It would, for example, enable therapies guided by high-resolution, patient-specific pharmacokinetics (including feedback-controlled drug delivery), opening new dimensions in personalized medicine. In response, we demonstrate here the ability of electrochemical aptamer-based (E-AB) sensors to support continuous, real-time, multihour measurements when emplaced directly in the circulatory systems of living animals. Specifically, we have used E-AB sensors to perform the multihour, real-time measurement of four drugs in the bloodstream of even awake, ambulatory rats, achieving precise molecular measurements at clinically relevant detection limits and high (3 s) temporal resolution, attributes suggesting that the approach could provide an important window into the study of physiology and pharmacokinetics.

| S-EPMC5278471 | biostudies-literature

Keeping pace with climate change: what is wrong with the evolutionary potential of upper thermal limits?

Project description:The potential of populations to evolve in response to ongoing climate change is partly conditioned by the presence of heritable genetic variation in relevant physiological traits. Recent research suggests that Drosophila melanogaster exhibits negligible heritability, hence little evolutionary potential in heat tolerance when measured under slow heating rates that presumably mimic conditions in nature. Here, we study the effects of directional selection for increased heat tolerance using Drosophila as a model system. We combine a physiological model to simulate thermal tolerance assays with multilocus models for quantitative traits. Our simulations show that, whereas the evolutionary response of the genetically determined upper thermal limit (CTmax) is independent of methodological context, the response in knockdown temperatures varies with measurement protocol and is substantially (up to 50%) lower than for CTmax. Realized heritabilities of knockdown temperature may grossly underestimate the true heritability of CTmax. For instance, assuming that the true heritability of CTmax in the base population is h(2) = 0.25, realized heritabilities of knockdown temperature are around 0.08-0.16 depending on heating rate. These effects are higher in slow heating assays, suggesting that flawed methodology might explain the apparently limited evolutionary potential of cosmopolitan D. melanogaster.

| S-EPMC3501637 | biostudies-literature

Upper thermal limits differ among and within component species in a tritrophic host-parasitoid-hyperparasitoid system.

Project description:Understanding how climate change affects host-parasite systems and predicting the consequences for ecosystems, economies, and human health has emerged as an important task for science and society. Some basic insight into this complex problem can be gained by comparing the thermal physiology of interacting host and parasite species. In this study, we compared upper thermal tolerance among three component species in a natural host-parasitoid-hyperparasitoid system from Virginia, USA. To assess the ecological relevance of our results, we also examined a record of maximum daily air temperatures collected near the study site in the last 124 years. We found that the caterpillar host Manduca sexta had a critical thermal maximum (CTmax) about 4°C higher than the parasitic wasp, Cotesia congregata, and the hyperparasitic wasp, Conura sp., had a CTmax about 6°C higher than its host, C. congregata. We also found significant differences in CTmax among instars and between parasitized and non-parasitized M. sexta. The highest maximum daily air temperature recorded near the study in the last 124 years was 42°C, which equals the average CTmax of one species (C. congregata) but is several degrees lower than the average CTmax of the other two species (M. sexta, Conura sp.) in this study. Our results combined with other studies suggest that significant differences in thermal performance within and among interacting host and parasite species are common in nature and that climate change may be largely disruptive to these systems with responses that are highly variable and complex.

| S-EPMC5997305 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data