Climate variability and the paradox of plasticity
Gunderson, A. R.; Logan, M. L.; Garcia-Costoya, G.
Show abstract
Adaptive phenotypic plasticity is expected to evolve when environmental conditions change predictably over time. This has led to the hypothesis that ectotherms in environments with low temperature seasonality, such as the tropics, should evolve lower thermophysiological plasticity than those from more seasonal environments (the Climate Variability Plasticity Hypothesis, or CVHP). Yet, empirical support for the CVHP is incredibly low, creating a need to identify other factors that can help explain how thermal plasticity evolves. Here, we use numerical models to show that the evolution of constitutive thermal tolerance breadth greatly affects the evolutionary benefits of thermal plasticity. In particular, tolerance breadth interacts with within- and between-season temperature variation in ways that can confound expectations of the CVHP, including conditions in which organisms from less seasonal environments benefit 30 most from expressing plasticity. Our findings indicate that a more holistic view of the relationship between thermophysiology and environmental temperature is needed to explain the evolution of thermal plasticity across climatic gradients.
Matching journals
The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- From proteins to species ranges: a framework for understanding thermal adaptation during range expansions 94%
- Skewed temperature dependence affects range and abundance in a warming world 93%
- Bet-hedging across generations can affect the evolution of variance-sensitive strategies within generations 93%
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.