Meeting Abstract

P2-164  Sunday, Jan. 5  Connecting thermal performance from mitochondrial physiology to population growth rate in an outbred insect population EL-SHESHENY, IA*; MATOO, OB; DELONG, JP; MONTOOTH, KL; University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA & Tanta University, Egypt; School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln i.elshesheny@yahoo.com http://montoothlab.unl.edu/

Climate change and global warming are affecting wildlife species across different ecosystems, warranting the integration of mathematical and physiological models of thermal performance to make robust predictions and capture context-dependent variability in population responses. Our approach is to connect thermal performance at different levels of biological organization in order to mechanistically understand how temperature will impact population dynamics. Here we present data on thermal performance curves for population growth rate and for its underlying life-history and physiological components, including female fecundity, development rate, survivorship, metabolic rate and mitochondrial function from an outbred population of Drosophila melanogaster. By modeling the thermal performance curve at each level as a function of an underlying set of nested thermal performance curves, we aim to connect the temperature dependence of underlying mitochondrial metabolism up through levels of organization to population growth. We discuss how our research may provide a predictive framework for forecasting the dynamic responses to environmental change from thermal metabolic responses through a series of currently unknown nested functions up to population level responses.