An individual-level approach to understanding responses to climate in wild ectotherms

生态系统如何应对气候变化是我们这个时代的紧迫问题之一。昆虫和其他无脊椎动物等“冷血”动物在陆地生态系统中发挥着关键作用，因此了解它们如何受到气候变化的影响至关重要。温度影响着外温动物生活的方方面面，为它们能做什么或不能做什么设定了界限，并决定了它们重要的代谢率。外温动物在可耐受的温度范围内执行其生理功能，并且诸如运动、繁殖和生长的关键功能强烈地依赖于温度。许多外温动物吸收来自太阳光的辐射，并与其直接的微环境交换热量。外温动物的体温可以与周围的空气温度有很大的不同。许多物种还利用行为来调节体温，例如通过进出太阳。虽然有大量的证据表明外温动物的行为温度调节，但我们不知道这为外温动物通过改变行为来适应气候变化提供了多大的潜力。环境科学预测气候变化将如何影响物种分布的主要方法是根据当前的分布和气候进行推断。他的方法的弱点是，我们知道环境空气温度是影响生物体热性能的气候条件的不良替代品。我们在西班牙北方的一片草地上进行了试点实验，在那里我们一直在监测田野蟋蟀的自然种群。这些研究表明，蟋蟀经常通过晒太阳达到比空气温度高20度的温度，它们进出洞穴以调节自己的温度。本项目的目的是解决关键问题，即我们如何根据气候预测个体外温动物将经历的温度，从而了解气候如何影响种群的生存能力。这些问题是：1.气候数据和个体外温动物经历的温度之间有什么关系？2.个人体温曲线如何影响自然界中的健身？3.塑料和进化适应气候的潜力是什么？我们将使用我们的蟋蟀种群来回答这些问题，目的是推断我们在蟋蟀身上学到的东西，以便我们能够对其他物种的巨大范围做出预测。蟋蟀是一种相当典型的温带昆虫，每年一代。我们将利用这样一个事实，即我们已经有12年的单独标记的蟋蟀的视频记录-超过一百万小时的蟋蟀进出洞穴的记录。我们将联合收割机将这些数据与自2006年以来我们在现场的气象站的数据相结合。这将使我们能够量化个体如何改变他们的行为以应对温度-他们允许自己变得多热，以及他们对温度的控制有多严格。利用我们已经进行的DNA指纹分析，我们可以计算出每只蟋蟀在下一代中有多少后代，这使我们能够根据它们对气候的反应来衡量蟋蟀的繁殖成功率。我们将把联合收割机这些视频档案研究与实地实验相结合。首先，我们将直接测量日照对幼年蟋蟀生长速度的影响。其次，我们将比较高海拔和低海拔种群之间的行为体温调节，看看是否仅凭行为就可以让一个物种生活在广泛的热环境中。第三，我们将进行一个易位实验，看看来自寒冷环境的个体与来自温暖环境的个体相比，在如何管理他们的温度方面是否存在遗传差异。

How ecosystems will change in response to changes in climate is one of the pressing questions of our times. 'Cold blooded' animals (ectotherms) such as insects and other invertebrates play key roles in terrestrial ecosystems, so understanding how they will be affected by climate change is of key importance. Temperature influences every aspect of the lives of ectotherms, setting boundaries on what they can or cannot do and dictating their vital metabolic rates. Ectotherms perform their physiological functions within a range of tolerable temperatures, and critical functionalities such as locomotion, reproduction and growth are strongly temperature-dependent. Many ectotherms absorb radiation from sunlight and exchange heat with their immediate microenvironments. The body temperature of an ectotherm can differ substantially from the ambient air temperature. Many species also use behaviour to regulate body temperature, for instance by moving in and out of the sun. Although there is abundant evidence for behavioural thermoregulation in ectotherms, we don't know how much potential this provides for ectotherms to adjust to changes in climate by changing their behaviour. The main way in which environmental science forecasts how changes in climate will affect the distribution of species is by extrapolating from current distributions and climates. The weakness of his approach is that we know that ambient air temperatures are a poor surrogate for the climatic conditions that affect the thermal performance of organisms. We have carried out pilot experiments in a meadow in Northern Spain where we have been monitoring a natural population of field crickets. These show that crickets frequently reach 20 degrees above the air temperature by basking in the sun and that they move in and out of their burrows in order to regulate their temperature.The aim of this project is to address key questions that relate to how we can predict the temperature that individual ectotherms will experience based on the climate and hence how climate affects the viability of populations. These questions are:1. What is the relationship between climate data and the temperatures that individual ectotherms experience?2. How do individual body temperature profiles impact fitness in nature?3. What is the potential for plastic and evolutionary adaptation to climate? We will use our cricket population to answer these questions with the aim of extrapolating what we learn in crickets to allow us to make predictions about a huge range of other species. Crickets are a fairly typical temperate insect species with a single generation each year. We will exploit the fact that we already have 12 years of video recordings of individually tagged crickets - more than a million hours of recordings of crickets moving in and out of their burrows. We will combine these data with data from a weather station we have had on-site since 2006. This will allow us to quantify how individuals change their behaviour in response to temperature - how hot they allow themselves to get, and how tightly they control their temperature. Using DNA fingerprinting that we have already carried out we can count how many offspring each individual has in the following generation which allows us to measure the reproductive success of crickets according to how they respond to the climate.We will combine these video archive studies with field experiments. Firstly we will directly measure the effect of sunshine on the growth rate of juvenile crickets. Secondly, we will compare behavioural thermoregulation between high and low altitude populations to see if behaviour alone can allow a single species to live in a wide range of thermal environments. Thirdly we will conduct a translocation experiment to see if there are genetic differences in how individuals from cold environments manage their temperature compared to individuals from warm environments.