Meeting Abstract
25.3 Friday, Jan. 4 Fine-scale variation in thermal ecology suggests resilience to climate change among tropical lizards LOGAN, ML; Dartmouth College michael.l.logan@dartmouth.edu
Recent studies have predicted widespread extinctions among tropical ectotherms driven by anthropogenic climate change. Tropical forest lizards, in particular, are thought to be vulnerable due to an assumed homogeneity of forest thermal environments and the risk posed by increased competition from heat-adapted open-habitat species. Many of these predictions, however, are based on environmental temperature data measured at a maximum resolution of 1 km2, whereas individuals of most species experience thermal variation on a much finer scale. Here, I combine thermal performance curves for three species of Anolis lizards from the Bay Islands archipelago of Honduras with high-resolution temperature distributions generated from species-specific physical models. I use these data to model the potential for open-habitat species to invade forest habitat and drive forest species to extinction, and to compare the vulnerabilities of closely related forest species occurring on different islands. My analyses suggest that the open-habitat species I studied will not invade forest habitat and may actually benefit from predicted warming for many decades. Conversely, by the year 2100, one of the forest species should experience reduced activity time as a result of warming, while the other is unlikely to experience a significant loss in performance. Our results suggest that global-scale predictions generated using low-resolution temperature data may overestimate the vulnerability of some tropical ectotherms to climate change.
