Can species adapt to a hotter world?
Some springtail species can endure antarctic cold down to -30°C. (Picture: Andy Murray)
Meeting of the sWEEP working group at Leipzig in 2014. (Picture: Foto: Stefan Bernhardt)
Researchers show that species' ability to adapt to climate warming is not unlimited
Based on a press release by Lancaster University, UK
Species evolve faster to adapt to the climate getting colder than to it getting hotter – and the rise in heat they can adapt to has limits. These are the main results of a study by an international team led by researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the University Rey Juan Carlos and University of Alcalá in Spain, involving researchers from Lancaster University and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). The new study, published in Nature Communications, explores how evolution has prepared some species to withstand these temperatures and how fast different species evolve to changing temperatures.
Red honey ants endure temperatures above 50°C in the Australian desert, while some springtail species survives extreme cold of -30°C in the Antarctic. Physiological tolerance to heat and cold determines where on the planet an organism can survive yet we have limited understanding of how this tolerance evolves over time. This is an area of increasing interest as the climate heats up more quickly than ever before. The new research helps to fill this gap in our knowledge, showing that species evolve heat tolerance more slowly than cold tolerance. It also suggests that heat tolerance cannot keep evolving indefinitely, most likely because there are fundamental limits to how far membranes and proteins can withstand heat.
”It took me more than a year to collect data for more than 2000 diverse species, including multicellular algae, marine invertebrates, mammals, birds and plants. I had to synthesize scientific works published across multiple decades that used very diverse methodologies,“ said lead author Dr Joanne Bennett, who conducted the study as postdoctoral researcher at iDiv and MLU, an who now is affiliated with the University of Canberra, Australia. The outcome was an unprecedented database on the ability of different species to tolerate heat extremes (GlobTherm database).
On this basis the authors tested whether past climate ”legacies“, current climatic extremes or physiological boundaries to evolution could best explain the enormous variation in thermal tolerance across species.
The study involved a group of renowned ecologists, physiologists and evolutionary biologists, including Dr Sally Keith, an ecologist from Lancaster University. They were gathered by Prof M.Á. Olalla-Tárraga from the University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain, and Prof I. Morales-Castilla from the University of Alcalá, Spain.
“Our work shows that the ability to adapt to cold has evolved up to twice as fast as the ability to adapt to heat,” comments Olalla-Tárraga. “The evolution of cold tolerance was fastest in endotherms [warm blooded species that can generate their own heat], perhaps reflecting their more recent evolution and expansion into cold climates,” adds Morales-Castilla.
Despite this varied evolutionary history, species appear best adapted to the extreme temperatures that they experience today, rather than to the temperatures that prevailed at the time, they first evolved. However, the authors also detected evolutionary “attractors”, which suggest there is an upper limit to how far physiological processes that increase heat tolerance can evolve.
“These attractors suggest that, although species appear to have adapted so far to warming climates, the process cannot continue indefinitely. The implication for species survival under ongoing climate change is of big concern if Earth’s temperatures exceed what appears to be a fundamental physiological boundary,” said Dr Sally Keith from Lancaster University.
This research was partly supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; FZT-118). It is a product of the sDiv working group sWEEP. iDiv's synthesis centre sDiv supports working group meetings where 10 to 20 national, international scientists and iDiv researchers work together on scientific issues.
Original publication:
(Researchers with iDiv affiliation bold)
Bennett, J.M., Sunday, J., Calosi, P., Villalobos, F., Martínez, B., Molina-Venegas, R., Araújo, M. B., Algar, A. C., Clusella-Trullas, S., Hawkins, B. A., Keith, S. A., Kühn, I., Rahbek, C., Rodríguez, L., Singer, A., Morales-Castilla, I. & Olalla-Tárraga, M. A. (2021): The evolution of critical thermal limits of life on Earth. Nature Communication 12, 1198. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21263-8
Contact:
Dr Joanne M. Bennett
Formerly
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Now
University of Canberra, Australia
Email: Joanne.Bennett@canberra.edu.au
Sebastian Tilch
Media and Communications
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Phone: +49 341 97 33197
Email: sebastian.tilch@idiv.de
Web: www.idiv.de/media
