Understanding temperature adaptation in tropical Andean butterflies

了解生物对其热环境的适应对于预测对气候变化的反应非常重要。热带昆虫约占地球上所有物种的一半，但对它们的热生态知之甚少。蝴蝶是热适应方面研究得最好的昆虫群体之一，但对热带物种对气候变化的反应知之甚少。人们对蝴蝶进行了广泛的研究，并且对该属物种的分布有很好的了解，但对决定物种范围的因素（例如温度与降雨量）或范围如何变化知之甚少。该属的许多物种都在安第斯山脉及其周围被发现，热适应似乎在划定该地区的生态位和推动分布向上移方面发挥了作用，但这在以前没有被研究过。目前已有大量的基因组资源用于研究海螺适应和物种形成的相关基因。这为从基因到种群、物种和群落等多个层面研究这一群体的热适应提供了机会，以调查和预测对气候变化的反应。

Understanding organisms' adaptation to their thermal environment is important for predicting responses to climate change. Tropical insects make up around half of all species on Earth, and yet very little is known about their thermal ecology. Butterflies are one of the best-studied insect groups with respect to thermal adaptation, but relatively little is known about the responses of tropical species to climate change. The Heliconius butterflies have been extensively studied and there is good information about the distributions of species in this genus, but very little is known about what determines species ranges (e.g. temperature versus rainfall), or how ranges have shifted. Many of the species in the genus are found in and around the Andes and it seems likely that thermal adaptation plays a role in delimiting niches in this area, and in driving distributions to shift uphill, but this has not previously been investigated. Excellent genomic resources are available for Heliconius, which have been used to investigate genes underlying adaptation and speciation. This provides the opportunity to investigate thermal adaptation in this group at multiple levels, from genes to populations, species and communities, to investigate and predict responses to climate change.