Meeting Abstract
Recent research is revealing incredible diversity in the thermoregulatory patterns of wild and captive endotherms. Classic thermoregulatory categories of ‘homeothermy’, ‘daily heterothermy’, and ‘hibernation’ are becoming harder to delineate and understanding the physiological and evolutionary significance of variation within and around these categories is becoming more important. But we lack a generalized analytical approach for categorizing and comparing the nature of temperature variation expressed by individuals, populations, and species. Here we propose a new approach that decomposes body temperature time series into three inherent properties – wave form, amplitude, and period – using a non-stationary technique that accommodates temporal variation in form, amplitude and period. This approach quantifies circadian and seasonal variation in thermoregulatory patterns, and uses the distribution of observed thermoregulatory patterns as a basis for intra- and inter-specific comparisons. We analyse body temperature time series from multiple species, including classical hibernators, tropical heterotherms, and homeotherms, to highlight the approach’s general usefulness and the major axes of thermoregulatory variation that it reveals.
