Browsing by Author "Alruiz, Jose M."

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    Temperature adaptation and its impact on the shape of performance curves in Drosophila populations
    (2023) Alruiz, Jose M.; Peralta-Maraver, Ignacio; Bozinovic, Francisco; Santos, Mauro; Rezende, Enrico L.
    Understanding how species adapt to different temperatures is crucial to predict their response to global warming, and thermal performance curves (TPCs) have been employed recurrently to study this topic. Nevertheless, fundamental questions regarding how thermodynamic constraints and evolution interact to shape TPCs in lineages inhabiting different environments remain unanswered. Here, we study Drosophila simulans along a latitudinal gradient spanning 3000 km to test opposing hypotheses based on thermodynamic constrains (hotter-is-better) versus biochemical adaptation (jack-of-all-temperatures) as primary determinants of TPCs variation across populations. We compare thermal responses in metabolic rate and the egg-to-adult survival as descriptors of organismal performance and fitness, respectively, and show that different descriptors of TPCs vary in tandem with mean environmental temperatures, providing strong support to hotter-is-better. Thermodynamic constraints also resulted in a strong negative association between maximum performance and thermal breadth. Lastly, we show that descriptors of TPCs for metabolism and egg-to-adult survival are highly correlated, providing evidence of co-adaptation, and that curves for egg-to-adult survival are systematically narrower and displaced toward lower temperatures. Taken together, our results support the pervasive role of thermodynamics constraining thermal responses in Drosophila populations along a latitudinal gradient, that are only partly compensated by evolutionary adaptation.
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    Thermal tolerance and survival responses to scenarios of experimental climatic change: changing thermal variability reduces the heat and cold tolerance in a fly
    (2016) Bozinovic, Francisco; Medina, Nadia R.; Alruiz, Jose M.; Cavieres, Grisel; Sabat, Pablo
    Climate change poses one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. Most analyses of the impacts have focused on changes in mean temperature, but increasing variance will also impact organisms and populations. We assessed the combined effects of the mean and the variance of temperature on thermal tolerances-i.e., critical thermal maxima, critical thermal minima, scope of thermal tolerance, and survival in Drosophila melanogaster. Our six experimental climatic scenarios were: constant mean with zero variance or constant variance or increasing variance; changing mean with zero variance or constant variance or increasing variance. Our key result was that environments with changing thermal variance reduce the scope of thermal tolerance and survival. Heat tolerance seems to be conserved, but cold tolerance decreases significantly with mean low as well as changing environmental temperatures. Flies acclimated to scenarios of changing variance-with either constant or changing mean temperatures-exhibited significantly lower survival rate. Our results imply that changing and constant variances would be just as important in future scenarios of climate change under greenhouse warming as increases in mean annual temperature. To develop more realistic predictions about the biological impacts of climate change, such interactions between the mean and variance of environmental temperature should be considered.