Meeting Abstract
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing modern society, and understanding how organisms will respond is among the most complex challenges faced by biologists. Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to have a number of effects, but two obvious changes will be general increases in environmental temperature, and increased frequency of heat waves. While the common paradigm is that animal populations will shift their range in response to climate change, extreme heat waves and acute heat stress are causing unprecedented die-offs, suggesting that physiological plasticity in thermal tolerance may be fundamental to adaptation. Here we test the thermal tolerance mechanisms, constraints, and costs for a widely distributed endotherm to acclimate to thermal stress associated with climate change and heat waves. We exposed Peromyscus species to a variety of heat shock regimes and measured a suite of physiological responses including heat shock protein gene expression, neuroendocrine stress function, as well as immune function. To examine how these thermal tolerance traits are associated with thermoregulatory traits and performance trade-offs we also coupled telemetry monitoring of body temperature and flow-through respirometry for metabolic costs with muscle performance testing.
