EDITORIAL
REVIEWS
- Climate impacts on organisms, ecosystems and human societies: integrating OCLTT into a wider context
Summary: This Review takes a broad view how OCLTT can be looked at as an evolutionary principle that allows a deeper understanding of connectivity and the impacts of climate change in biological systems.
- Physiological adaptation to cities as a proxy to forecast global-scale responses to climate change
Summary: We provide a quantitative synthesis of the use of cities as warming experiments and space-for-time substitutions to explore plasticity and evolution of thermal physiological traits under global change.
- Towards more integration of physiology, dispersal and land-use change to understand the responses of species to climate change
Summary: To better understand and predict responses of species and biodiversity in a world of global change, we need more integration across disciplines, of data and methods, and across scales.
- Shifts in the relative fitness contributions of fecundity and survival in variable and changing environments
Summary: We explore how detecting and predicting shifts in survival and fecundity fitness constraints can improve our ability to forecast responses to climate gradients and change.
- Predicting the effects of climate change on incubation in reptiles: methodological advances and new directions
Summary: As models of embryonic development are translated from the laboratory to natural nests and scaled up to populations, fine-scale temperature data are increasingly important yet remain an often-overlooked component of our understanding of thermal developmental plasticity in reptiles.
- Diving in hot water: a meta-analytic review of how diving vertebrate ectotherms will fare in a warmer world
Summary: Using meta-analytic approaches, we show that diving ectothermic vertebrates are particularly vulnerable to climate warming. On average, dive durations decreased by 11% with every 1°C increase in water temperature.
- How dryland mammals will respond to climate change: the effects of body size, heat load and a lack of food and water
Summary: Dryland mammals facing climate change are encountering increasing heat as well as reduced water and food availability. We discuss these compound effects on performance in mammals of varying body size.
- Physiological consequences of Arctic sea ice loss on large marine carnivores: unique responses by polar bears and narwhals
Summary: Two Arctic marine mammal specialists, polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and narwhals (Monodon monoceros), are physiologically limited in their ability to respond to a rapidly warming Arctic.
- Thermoregulation in desert birds: scaling and phylogenetic variation in heat tolerance and evaporative cooling
Summary: Many physiological variables related to avian heat tolerance vary significantly with body mass, but also vary substantially among taxa that differ in their reliance on panting, gular flutter or cutaneous evaporation for evaporative heat dissipation.
- Dealing with predictable and unpredictable temperatures in a climate change context: the case of parasitoids and their hosts
Summary: Plasticity and bet-hedging may be adaptive strategies of hosts and parasitoids to cope with the continuum of predictable and unpredictable fluctuating temperatures in a changing climate context.
- The role of mechanistic physiology in investigating impacts of global warming on fishes
Summary: Thermal performance curves are important for predicting warming effects on fish. A review of current data indicates that aerobic scope is not universally limited by warming, and alternative measures are suggested.
- Bioenergetics in environmental adaptation and stress tolerance of aquatic ectotherms: linking physiology and ecology in a multi-stressor landscape
Summary: Quantification of organismal energy fluxes under different stress scenarios follows predictions of the ecological outcomes of stress exposures and understanding of the mechanisms of stressor interactions.
- Avenues of reef-building coral acclimatization in response to rapid environmental change
Summary: Reef-building corals are under threat from anthropogenic impacts. The partners of the coral holobiont and coral developmental process provide symbiotic, epigenetic and genetic mechanisms for acclimatization and adaptation to climate change.
This issue
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Other journals from The Company of Biologists
Predicting the Future: Species Survival in a Changing World
Read our new special issue exploring the significant role of experimental biology in assessing and predicting the susceptibility or resilience of species to future, human-induced environmental change.
Big Biology Podcast - Hollie Putnam and coral bleaching
Catch the next JEB-sponsored episode of the Big Biology Podcast where Art and Marty talk to Hollie Putnam about the causes of coral bleaching and the basic biology of corals in the hope of selectively breeding corals that can better tolerate future ocean conditions.
Read Hollie's Review on the subject, which is featured in our current special issue.
Stark trade-offs and elegant solutions in arthropod visual systems
Many elegant eye specializations that evolved in response to visual challenges continue to be discovered. A new Review by Meece et al. summarises exciting solutions evolved by insects and other arthropods in response to specific visual challenges.
Head bobbing gives pigeons a sense of perspective
Pigeons might look goofy with their head-bobbing walk, but it turns out that the ungainly head manoeuvre allows the birds to judge distance.