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Dryad

Data for: Cold adaptation does not handicap warm tolerance in the most abundant Arctic seabird

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Abstract

Arctic birds and mammals are physiologically adapted to survive in cold environments but live in the fastest-warming region on the planet. They should therefore be most threatened by climate change. Combining modelling and physiological measurements in dovekies (Alle alle) from East Greenland, we demonstrate that cold adaptation in this small Arctic seabird does not handicap acute tolerance to air temperatures more than 10 °C above their current maximum. We predict that climate warming will reduce the energetic costs of thermoregulation for dovekies, but their capacity to cope with rising temperatures will be constrained by water intake and salt balance. Dovekies evolved 15 million years ago, and their thermoregulatory physiology might reflect adaptation to paleoclimates that were substantially warmer than the present-day.