A Theoretical Thermal Tolerance Function for Ectothermic Animals and Its Implications for Identifying Thermal Vulnerability across Large Geographic Scales

Abstract

The time-to-thermal-death curve, or thermal death curve, seeks to represent all the combinations of exposure time and temperature that kill individuals of a species. We present a new theoretical function to describe that time in lizards based on traditional measures of thermal tolerance (i.e., preferred body temperatures, voluntary thermal maximum, and the critical thermal maximum). We evaluated the utility of this function in two ways. Firstly, we compared thermal death curves among four species of lizards for which enough data are available. Secondly, we compared the geography of predicted thermal vulnerability based on the thermal death curve. We found that the time to loss of function or death may evolve independently from the critical thermal limits. Moreover, the traditional parameters predicted fewer deleterious sites, systematically situated at lower latitudes and closer to large water bodies (lakes or the coast). Our results highlight the urgency of accurately characterizing thermal tolerance across species to reach a less biased perception of the geography of climatic vulnerability.