title: Coping with daily thermal variability: behavioural performance of an ectotherm model in a warming world.
abstract: Global climate change poses one of the greatest threats to species persistence. Most analyses of the potential biological impacts have focused on changes in mean temperature, but changes in thermal variance will also impact organisms and populations. We assessed the effects of acclimation to daily variance of temperature on dispersal and exploratory behavior in the terrestrial isopod Porcellio laevis in an open field. Acclimation treatments were 24 ± 0, 24 ± 4 and 24 ± 8 °C. Because the performance of ectotherms relates nonlinearly to temperature, we predicted that animals acclimated to a higher daily thermal variation should minimize the time exposed in the centre of open field, --i.e. increase the linearity of displacements. Consistent with our prediction, isopods acclimated to a thermally variable environment reduce their exploratory behaviour, hypothetically to minimize their exposure to adverse environmental conditions. This scenario as well as the long latency of animals after releases acclimated to variable environments is consistent with this idea. We suggested that to develop more realistic predictions about the biological impacts of climate change, one must consider the interactions between the mean and variance of environmental temperature on animals' performance.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ecología and Center of Applied Ecology & Sustainability (CAPES), Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, P. Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Centro de Investigación e Innovación para el Cambio Climático, Universidad Santo Tomás, Santiago, Chile.
authors.forename: José M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Rojas
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ecología and Center of Applied Ecology & Sustainability (CAPES), Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, P. Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
authors.forename: Simón B
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Castillo
authors.affiliation: Filosofía de la Biología Group, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales & Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: Guillermo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Folguera
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ecología and Center of Applied Ecology & Sustainability (CAPES), Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, P. Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad, Santiago, Chile.
authors.forename: Sebastián
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Abades
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ecología and Center of Applied Ecology & Sustainability (CAPES), Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, P. Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
authors.forename: Francisco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Bozinovic
mesh_terms: D000064:Acclimatization; D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D057232:Global Warming; D033321:Isopoda / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D013696:Temperature; D013997:Time Factors