Meeting Abstract
Increasing temperature variability is likely to be an important biological disturbance over the next few decades, as it increases the risk that species’ tolerance limits will be exceeded. In response to thermal stress, many organisms exhibit characteristic physiological changes that increase tolerance to subsequent high temperatures. The activation of this so-called “heat shock response” requires, however, a significant energetic investment. In addition to positive effects on survival, heat shock responses may involve large sublethal effects that include reduced growth or reproduction due to energetic trade-offs between competing life history traits. Although there is growing recognition that stress may have important implications for population persistence and species interactions in the face of global climate change, we still lack a general framework for understanding how increasing temperature variation will influence the relative size of sublethal versus lethal thermal effects in natural ecosystems. That said, theoretical approaches that have worked in other ecological contexts (e.g., optimal behavioral and morphological prey responses to predator risk) might be successfully modified to provide predictions about thermal stress as well. We present one such model, highlighting its potential to guide the development of rigorous hypotheses and associated predictions for how organisms might respond to increasing environmental temperatures.
