Day/night upper thermal limits differ within Ectatomma ruidum ant colonies

Nelson, Annika S.; Scott, Trey J; Barczyk, M.; McGlynn, Terrence P.; Avalos, Arián; Clifton, Elizabeth; Das, Amlan; Figueiredo, Andreia; Figueroa, Laura L.; Janowiecki, Mark A.; Pahlke, Sarah; Rana, Jignasha D.; O’Donnell, Sean

doi:10.1007/s00040-017-0585-4

Cited by 9 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…For example, ant species may preferentially forage in microhabitats (Baudier et al 2015;Kaspari and Weiser 2000), or during different times of the day (Stuble et al 2013), that best match their thermal requirements. This can include switching from diurnal to nocturnal activity (Nelson et al 2017). If this is the case, climate change is likely to have highly speciesspecific impacts on ant activity, given the variation among species in both thermal tolerance and foraging behaviour (Oberg et al 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is thermal limitation the primary driver of elevational distributions? Not for montane rainforest ants in the Australian Wet Tropics

et al. 2018

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Terrestrial ectotherms are likely to be especially sensitive to rising temperatures over coming decades. Thermal limits are used to measure climatic tolerances that potentially affect ectotherm distribution. While there is a strong relationship between the critical thermal maximum (CT) of insects and their latitudinal ranges, the nature of this relationship across elevation is less clear. Here we investigated the combined relationships between CT, elevation and ant body mass, given that CT can also be influenced by body mass, in the World Heritage-listed rainforests of the Australian Wet Tropics. We measured the CT and body mass of 20 ant species across an elevational gradient from 350 to 1000 m a.s.l. Community CT did not vary systematically with increasing elevation and there was no correlation between elevation and elevational ranges of species. However, body mass significantly decreased at higher elevations. Despite the negative correlation between CT and body mass at the community level, there was no significant difference in CT of different-sized ants within a species. These findings are not consistent with either the climatic variability hypothesis, Rapoport's rule or Bergmann's rule. Models indicated that elevation and body mass had limited influences on CT. Our results suggest that the distribution of most montane ants in the region is not strongly driven by thermal limitation, and climate change will likely impact ant species differently. This is likely to occur primarily through changes in rainfall via its effects on vegetation structure and therefore thermal microhabitats, rather than through direct temperature changes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is thermal limitation the primary driver of elevational distributions? Not for montane rainforest ants in the Australian Wet Tropics

et al. 2018

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“…Simultaneously, colonies demonstrated overt diel shifts in thermal persistence in the absence of external temporal cues, supporting the Circadian Rhythm Hypothesis. While we found some differences in thermal performance associated with behavioral roles, the Division of Labor Hypothesis could not account for differences in thermal persistence based on time of day, even though that was the prior finding that led us to conduct the present study (Esch et al, 2017;Nelson et al, 2018). The authors of the earlier studies wondered how colonies of E. ruidum managed the thermal tolerance of foragers associated with diel changes in temperature.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

“…We chose this approach because it is most representative of the biological phenomena we are investigating. After pilot experiments, we chose against estimating critical thermal maxima (CT max ) because this approach produces little intraspecific variance in this species (Esch et al, 2017;Nelson et al, 2018) and there is poor reproducibility (Ribeiro et al, 2012). In the thermal persistence assay, ants were individually loaded into 2 mL plastic microcentrifuge tubes and subjected to a constant temperate of 42ºC in a heating/cooling block (Tropicooler 260014, Boekel Scientific, Feasterville, PA, USA).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Colony-level mechanisms of thermal tolerance regulation in the ant Ectatomma ruidum

McGlynn¹,

Clifton²,

Escamilla³

et al. 2020

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1. Insects spend energy to function in high temperature environments, and because social insects employ a division of labor, it is likely that thermal tolerance varies among individuals in the colony, based on the tasks that they perform. 2. Foraging workers of the ant Neotropical ant Ectatomma ruidum are known to show temporal differences in thermal tolerance, with greater tolerance in hot afternoons, relative to cool mornings. 3. We developed three hypotheses that can account for temporal differences in thermal tolerance among workers: Thermal Acclimation, Division of Labor, and Circadian Rhythm. 4. We tested these hypotheses with a pair of experiments that involved the measurement of thermal persistence of ants at a constant temperature in time-to-failure assays. The first experiment compared ants with different behavioral roles in colonies, and the second compared colonies subjected to thermal manipulations, then iteratively sampled at daily thermal maxima and minima. 5. We found robust support for the Circadian Rhythm and Thermal Acclimation Hypotheses, and little support for the Division of Labor Hypothesis. Colonies of this species integrate multiple mechanisms of adapting to thermal challenges including time of day, ambient temperature, and the behavioral context of individual workers.

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“…Thermal traits were also not quantified in the original surveys during the mid‐90s, and thus, we cannot account for the potential of thermal traits plastically varying through time. Surely, documenting how CT max and CT min change daily, seasonally, and annually will be an important topic for future research (Nelson et al 2018, Bujan et al 2020 b ). That said, these 33 resurveys required two years and over three person‐years to collect and analyze.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thermal traits predict the winners and losers under climate change: an example from North American ant communities

et al. 2021

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Across the globe, temperatures are predicted to increase with consequences for many taxonomic groups. Arthropods are particularly at risk as temperature imposes physiological constraints on growth, survival, and reproduction. Given that arthropods may be disproportionately affected in a warmer climate—the question becomes which taxa are vulnerable and can we predict the supposed winners and losers of climate change? To address this question, we resurveyed 33 ant communities, quantifying 20‐yr differences in the incidence of 28 genera. Each North American ant community was surveyed with 30 1‐m2 plots, and the incidence of each genus across the 30 plots was used to estimate change. From the original surveys in 1994–1997 to the resurveys in 2016–2017, temperature increased on average 1°C (range, −0.4°C to 2.5°C) and ~64% of ant genera increased in more than half of the sampled communities. To test Thermal Performance Theory's prediction that genera with higher average thermal limits will tend to accumulate at the expense of those with lower limits, we quantified critical thermal maxima (CTmax: the high temperatures at which they lose muscle control) and minima (CTmin: the low temperatures at which ants first become inactive) for common genera at each site. Consistent with prediction, we found a positive decelerating relationship between CTmax and the proportion of sites in which a genus had increased. CTmin, by contrast, was not a useful predictor of change. There was a strong positive correlation (r = 0.85) between the proportion of sites where a genus was found with higher incidence after 20 yr and the average difference in number of plots occupied per site, suggesting genera with high CTmax values tended to occupy more plots at more sites after 20 yr. Thermal functional traits like CTmax have thus proved useful in predicting patterns of long‐term community change in a dominant, diverse insect taxon.

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Day/night upper thermal limits differ within Ectatomma ruidum ant colonies

Cited by 9 publications

References 30 publications

Is thermal limitation the primary driver of elevational distributions? Not for montane rainforest ants in the Australian Wet Tropics

Is thermal limitation the primary driver of elevational distributions? Not for montane rainforest ants in the Australian Wet Tropics

Colony-level mechanisms of thermal tolerance regulation in the ant Ectatomma ruidum

Thermal traits predict the winners and losers under climate change: an example from North American ant communities

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