Climate change may alter phenology within populations with cascading consequences for community interactions and ongoing evolutionary processes. Here, we measured the response to climate change in two sympatric, recently diverged (~170 years) populations of Rhagoletis pomonella flies specialized on different host fruits (hawthorn and apple) and their parasitoid wasp communities. We tested whether warmer temperatures affect dormancy regulation and its consequences for synchrony across trophic levels and temporal isolation between divergent populations. Under warmer temperatures, both fly populations developed earlier. However, warming significantly increased the proportion of maladaptive pre-winter development in apple, but not hawthorn, flies. Parasitoid phenology was less affected, potentially generating ecological asynchrony. Observed shifts in fly phenology under warming may decrease temporal isolation, potentially limiting ongoing divergence. Our findings of complex sensitivity of life-history timing to changing temperatures predict that coming decades may see multifaceted ecological and evolutionary changes in temporal specialist communities.

These are laboratory eclosion data for Rhagoletis pomonella flies and their community of parasitoid wasps from an a climate warming simulation study. See Lackey, Deneen, Feder, Ragland, Hahn, and Powell, "Simulated climate change causes asymmetric responses in insect life history timing potentially disrupting a classic ecological speciation system" BioRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.06.519222 for detailed methods.

These data are presented in a tab-delimited R dataframe, which can be opened with a text editor or a spreadsheet program.