Affiliation:
1. Department of Biology, Stanford University, 327 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Abstract
How mosquitoes may respond to rapid climate warming remains unknown for most species, but will have major consequences for their future distributions, with cascading impacts on human well-being, biodiversity and ecosystem function. We investigated the adaptive potential of a wide-ranging mosquito species,
Aedes sierrensis
, across a large climatic gradient by conducting a common garden experiment measuring the thermal limits of mosquito life-history traits. Although field-collected populations originated from vastly different thermal environments that spanned over 1200 km, we found limited variation in upper thermal tolerance between populations. In particular, the upper thermal limits of all life-history traits varied by less than 3°C across the species range and, for most traits, did not differ significantly between populations. For one life-history trait—pupal development rate—we did detect significant variation in upper thermal limits between populations, and this variation was strongly correlated with source temperatures, providing evidence of local thermal adaptation for pupal development. However, we found that maximum environmental temperatures across most of the species' range already regularly exceed the highest upper thermal limits estimated under constant temperatures.
This result suggests that strategies for coping with and/or avoiding thermal extremes are likely key components of current and future mosquito thermal tolerance.
Funder
Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics, Stanford University
National Science Foundation
Lewis and Clark Field scholarship
Bing-Mooney Fellowship
Stanford University Center for Innovation in Global Health
Philippe Cohen Graduate Fellowship
Pacific Southwest Center of Excellence
National Institutes of Health
Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology Program
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine