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Data from: Temperature variability and metabolic adaptation in terrestrial and aquatic ectotherms

Carter, Mauricio J.1; Cortes, Pablo A.; Rezende, Enrico L.2

Published Nov 25, 2024 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jm63xsjf2

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Nov 25, 2024 version files 770.72 KB

Abstract

Thermodynamics is a major factor determining rates of biochemical processes, rates of energy expenditure, and ultimately resilience to global warming in ectothermic organisms. Nonetheless, whether ectothermic organisms exhibit general adaptive metabolic responses to cope with different thermal conditions has remained a highly contentious subject over the past several decades. Here we combine a model comparison approach with a global dataset of standard metabolic rates (SMR), which include 1,160 measurements across 788 species of aquatic invertebrates, insects, fishes, amphibians, and reptiles, to investigate the association between metabolic rates and environmental temperatures in their respective habitats. Using Akaike’s information criterion (AICc) to compare different candidate models, our analyses suggest that variation in SMR after removing allometric and thermodynamic effects is best explained by the total temperature range encountered across seasons, which always provided a better fit than the average temperature for the hottest and coldest month, as well as mean annual temperatures. This pattern was consistent across taxonomic groups and robust to sensitivity analyses. Nonetheless, aquatic and terrestrial lineages responded differently to seasonality, with SMR declining –6.8 % ºC–1 of temperature variation in aquatic organisms and increasing 2.8 % ºC– 1 in terrestrial.  These responses may reflect alternative strategies to mitigate the impact of warmer temperatures on energy expenditure, either by means of metabolic reduction in thermally homogeneous water bodies or effective behavioral thermoregulation to exploit temperature heterogeneity on land.