INVESTIGADORES
FOLGUERA Guillermo
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Impacto de la amplitud térmica experimental sobre el performance de ectodermos. ¿Adaptación a la variabilidad térmica?
Autor/es:
FOLGUERA, G.; BASTIAS, D.; BOZINOVIC, F.
Lugar:
Pucón, Chile.
Reunión:
Congreso; LII reunión anual de la sociedad de biología de Chile; 2009
Institución organizadora:
Sociedad de Biología de Chile
Resumen:
Global climate change is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity; one of the most important effects is
increase in the mean earth surface temperature. However, another but poorly studied main effect of global
change appears to be an increase in temperature variability. Most of the current analyses of global change
have focused on mean values, paying less attention to the role of the fluctuations of environmental variables.
We tested the effects of daily thermal amplitude with constant mean (2424 °C, 2721 °C and 3216 °C) on
different performance traits (rollover speed, body mass balance and survival) in populations of woodlouse
(Porcellio laevis) from two altitudes. We observed that maximum performance showed a significant effect of
population in the first but not in the fifth week, and only the population effect was significant for optimum
temperature. Interestingly, populations under higher amplitude in environmental temperature exhibited
higher resistance to a fluctuating climatic regime. We suggest that our results indicate that thermal
variability may produce important effects on biodiversity. Therefore, in order to develop more realistic
scenarios of global climate change effects on biodiversity, the effects of thermal variability as well as mean
need to be examined simultaneously.