Our 2nd pub for 2021 was just published in Annals of the Entomological Society of America. The idea for this review article started years ago at an annual meeting and we have been talking about topics to include ever since. In collaboration with Diane Roeder and Jelena Bujan, we put those ideas on paper. We spent about half a year going through published literature on ant thermal tolerance and found some interesting trends.
Over the past 30 years, there has been exponential growth in the number of ant thermal papers published. Many of these discuss 5 common metrics: critical thermal limits, lethal thermal limits, knock-down resistance, chill-coma recovery, and supercooling. We break down what we think are interesting patterns and hypotheses of thermal tolerance along spatial and temporal temperature gradients, focusing on relationships with latitude, elevation, urbanization, microclimate and ways ants cope with different temperatures like seasonal plasticity and acclimation. We further discuss other sources of variation including evolutionary history, body size, age, castes, and nutrition. To move the field further we highlight several topics that we think are interesting but currently lacking, ranging in scope from methods development to the impacts of climate change.
You can find an open access version of our paper by [CLICKING HERE]
Roeder Lab 