Dataset Information

Occupancy-derived thermal affinities reflect known physiological thermal limits of marine species.

ABSTRACT: Predicting how species will respond to increased environmental temperatures is key to understanding the ecological consequences of global change. The physiological tolerances of a species define its thermal limits, while its thermal affinity is a summary of the environmental temperatures at the localities at which it actually occurs. Experimentally derived thermal limits are known to be related to observed latitudinal ranges in marine species, but accurate range maps from which to derive latitudinal ranges are lacking for many marine species. An alternative approach is to combine widely available data on global occurrences with gridded global temperature datasets to derive measures of species-level "thermal affinity"-that is, measures of the central tendency, variation, and upper and lower bounds of the environmental temperatures at the locations at which a species has been recorded to occur. Here, we test the extent to which such occupancy-derived measures of thermal affinity are related to the known thermal limits of marine species using data on 533 marine species from 24 taxonomic classes and with experimentally derived critical upper temperatures spanning 2-44.5°C. We show that thermal affinity estimates are consistently and positively related to the physiological tolerances of marine species, despite gaps and biases in the source data. Our method allows thermal affinity measures to be rapidly and repeatably estimated for many thousands more marine species, substantially expanding the potential to assess vulnerability of marine communities to warming seas.

SUBMITTER: Webb TJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7391554 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Occupancy-derived thermal affinities reflect known physiological thermal limits of marine species.

Webb Thomas J TJ Lines Aaron A Howarth Leigh M LM

Ecology and evolution 20200615 14

Predicting how species will respond to increased environmental temperatures is key to understanding the ecological consequences of global change. The physiological tolerances of a species define its thermal limits, while its thermal affinity is a summary of the environmental temperatures at the localities at which it actually occurs. Experimentally derived thermal limits are known to be related to observed latitudinal ranges in marine species, but accurate range maps from which to derive latitud ...[more]

PMID: 32760510

Similar Datasets

Project description:Although most animals live in complex, thermally variable environments, the impact of this variability on specific physiological systems is still unresolved. The ectotherm heart is known to change in both structure and function to ensure appropriate oxygen delivery under different thermal regimes, but the plasticity of the upper thermal limits of the heart under stable or variable thermal acclimation conditions remains unknown. To investigate the role of thermal variability on cardiac acclimation potential, we acclimated a eurythermal fish, opaleye (Girella nigricans), to three static temperature treatments (13, 16, and 19 °C) as well as two oscillating treatments which cycled between maximum and minimum temperatures every 12 h (13-19 °C and 16-22 °C). These temperatures and daily thermal ranges were chosen to mimic the conditions observed in the rocky intertidal environments in Santa Barbara, CA, USA where the fish were collected. We hypothesized that increasing temperature would increase upper thermal limits of the heart, and that variable acclimations would result in broader acute thermal performance curves (TPCs) compared to static acclimations. We measured maximum heart rate during acute warming to determine cardiac thermal performance (i.e., the temperature corresponding to the onset of cardiac arrythmia, the temperature at maximum heart rate, absolute maximum heart rate, and the Arrhenius breakpoint temperature) and construct acute TPCs. Rising static acclimation temperatures increased upper thermal limits but had no impact on peak maximum heart rate. The warmest static temperature did, however, cause a narrowing of the acute TPC. Fish acclimated to variable conditions had the same upper thermal limits compared to fish acclimated to static conditions with the same mean temperature in all metrics of thermal performance. Further, there was no significant broadening of the acute TPC. This study suggests that cardiac plasticity is robust to thermal variation in this eurythermal fish.

Dataset Information

Occupancy-derived thermal affinities reflect known physiological thermal limits of marine species.

Publications

Occupancy-derived thermal affinities reflect known physiological thermal limits of marine species.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets