Meeting Abstract
In the face of climate change, adaptability and plasticity of thermoregulatory traits may determine whether a species survives long term. Although thermoregulation is largely a physiological phenomenon in many endothermic species, for many ectotherms the maintenance of body temperatures between their critical thermal maximum and minimum is achieved through a complex suite of behaviors. The fiddler crab Uca pugilator lives on sandy beaches and on tidally influenced sandflats within marshes from the Caribbean to the northeastern coasts of the United States, and during the summer months the daily temperatures experienced by U. pugilator in these habitats can well exceed its critical thermal maximum. Despite this fact, U. pugilator retains high fitness throughout its habitat range via thermoregulatory behaviors, many of which center around building, maintaining, owning, and retreating into their sandy burrows. This study focuses on burrows as a thermoregulatory resource in U. pugilator, addressing several questions concerning burrows and borrow-ownership. A survey of burrow metrics along the east coast of the United States from New York to Florida has recently been conducted to quantify changes in burrow size and shape that may be correlated with temperature variation across this latitudinal gradient. Additionally, the DNA of cohabitating males and females and those females’s offspring will be sequenced and paternity analyses will be performed to better understand how mated pairs share or do not share burrows. In the future, the time, effort, and thermal stress associated with burrow building and maintenance will be assessed via controlled field experiments to shed light on the costs of burrow ownership as well as the antagonistic interactions observed between males in U. pugilator and may other fiddler crabs species.
