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很重要。热带昆虫约占地球上所有物种的一半，但人们对它们的热生态知之甚少。蝴蝶是在热适应方面研究得最好的昆虫群体之一，但人们对热带物种对气候变化的反应知之甚少。人们对赫利柯斯蝴蝶进行了广泛的研究，关于该属物种的分布也有很好的信息，但关于是什么决定了物种范围(例如温度与降雨量)，或者范围是如何变化的，人们知之甚少。该属中的许多物种都在安第斯山脉及其周围发现，似乎热适应在划定该地区的生态位以及推动分布向上移方面发挥了作用，但这在以前还没有被调查过。赫利柯尼乌斯有很好的基因组资源，已被用于研究潜在的适应和物种形成的基因。这提供了从基因到种群、物种和群落等多个层面调查这一群体的热适应的机会，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.