Heat tolerance in tropical Lepidoptera varies with microclimate, life stage, and larval feeding strategy
Data files
Sep 26, 2025 version files 40.62 KB
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Code_data.zip
38.67 KB
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README.md
1.95 KB
Abstract
Understanding heat tolerance variation and its drivers is crucial for predicting climate change impacts on biodiversity. While most studies focus on adults and macroclimate effects on heat tolerance, how microclimate shapes heat tolerance variation across life stages and feeding strategies remain largely untested. We quantified heat tolerance (Critical Thermal Maximum: CTmax) variation in 35 species of moth larvae (caterpillars) within a seasonal tropical forest. For 17 species we were also able to measure the CTmax of adults. We tested how seasonal macroclimate and life stage-specific microclimate drove CTmax variation across life stages, and how feeding strategy-specific microclimate drove CTmax variation in caterpillars. We found strong seasonal effects, with caterpillars and adults exhibiting higher CTmax in the hot season. Caterpillars exhibited higher CTmax than conspecific adults in the cool season, but this pattern was reversed in the hot season. Shelter-building caterpillars experiencing cooler microclimates exhibited lower CTmax than free-living caterpillars. Our study highlights the complex drivers of heat tolerance and the importance of microclimate in shaping heat tolerance variation across life stages and feeding strategies.
Dataset DOI: 10.5061/dryad.m905qfvcs
Description of the data and file structure
The dataset included a heat tolerance (CTmax) and body size (thorax width) data of Lepidoptera larvae (caterpillars) and adults collected from a seasonal evergreen tropical rainforest during Apr-May (Hot season) and Nov-Dec (Cool season) in 2019, 2020, 2024.
CTmax was measured with water bath (Grant-TXF200) at the ramping rate of 0.2 celsius per minute. Both caterpillar and adults (reared from caterpillars) are reared in the lab at the correponding temperate regime during the period of collection. The criteria for CTmax measurements in both caterpillar and adults are complete stop of movements of appendages
Files and variables
This archive file includes R codes used for our analysis, excel file that contained the data used, and a phylogenetic tree stored in txt format.
The excel file contains three sheets, with name of each correspond to the name of csv file mentioned in R code. Specifically, sheet CTmax3lar contains caterpillar CTmax data, sheet CTmax3_con contains both caterpillar and adult moth CTmax data, and sheet CTmax4 contains additional taxonmic information together with CTmax that used to test the phylogenetic signal in CTmax.
In sheet CTmax3lar, column width represents body width (in mm), mobility represents whether species are free-living or building leaf-shelters. In sheet CTmax3_con, additional column name stage is included to represent whether the CTmax were from caterpillars or adults. In sheet CTmax4, column ID is the orginal species name, column species is the updated species name from taxonomic correction. column speciesmoth indicated whether this species was included in the phylogenetic tree (in this column, species not the phylogenetic tree were left blank)