Meeting Abstract
Insects and other organisms must respond to various natural stressors, but also to increasing array of anthropogenic stressors. Climate change and other stressors form a complex multi-stressor environment with many potential interactions between stresses. The responses and resistance of organisms to climate change will depend on their responses to combinations of stressors, which may or may not reflect responses to single stressors in isolation. Although important, combined effects of multiple stressors are particularly difficult to study and there are many examples on interactive and counterintuitive effects of multiple stressors, which leads to the concern that their complexity will make accurate predictions of the consequences of anthropogenic change impossible. We surveyed the Anglophone literature, and provide an overview of the current knowledge on the impacts and interactions of different stressors in insects. Although synergistic stressor interactions (resulting in a greater-than-expected impact) appear common among insects, the thin taxonomic spread of existing data means that more multi-stressor studies and new approaches are needed. Multiple stressor studies, especially with three or more stressors, are fairly rare. Published multiple stressor research is still mainly of phenomenological and descriptive in character, missing mechanistic, predictive understanding. Further, we must identify which stressor interactions, and species’ responses to them, are generalizable (i.e. most or all species respond similarly to the same stressor combination), and thus predictable (for new combinations of stressors, or stressors acting via known mechanisms). We discuss experimental approaches that could facilitate this shift towards predictive understanding of multiple stressors.
