Meeting Abstract
The role of phenotypic plasticity in mediating responses to climate warming remains a heavily-debated topic in global change biology. However, “plasticity” is used across multiple contexts and often without specification of the cue which elicits the plastic response. The environmental effects of climate warming are not likely to be uniform nor predictable, and distinct environmental cues should alter the shape and form of phenotypic plasticity such that a single estimate of plasticity cannot capture the likely range of phenotypes produced by climate change. Here, we create a framework to estimate the direction of phenotypic change given multiple environmental changes of climate warming for the ornate tree lizard. We varied the environmental cue of phenotypic plasticity such that individuals were exposed to (1) a limited availability of energetic resources, (2) short-term and severe thermal fluctuations, and (3) a long-term and thermally variable acclamatory regime and assessed how these cues influence key behavioral and physiological traits. Plasticity in response to energetic resource limitation results in phenotypic shifts in thermal performance curves and thermal preference favoring cooler temperatures. Exposure to sub-lethal temperatures acutely increases thermal tolerance, but results in a trade-off with both performance capacity and thermoregulatory effectiveness. Local adaptation alters the expression of plasticity, however as acclimation temperature increases, thermoregulatory behavior and thermal physiology shift to exploit cooler temperatures. There exist multiple constraints on using limited estimates of plasticity for forecasting species responses to climate warming, and our work demonstrates a holistic design that can quantify the directions of phenotypic change in response to several environmental consequences of climate warming.
