Tropical butterflies use thermal buffering and thermal tolerance as alternative strategies to cope with temperature increase.

ABSTRACT: Climate change poses a severe threat to many taxa, with increased mean temperatures and frequency of extreme weather events predicted. Insects can respond to high temperatures using behaviour, such as angling their wings away from the sun or seeking cool local microclimates to thermoregulate or through physiological tolerance. In a butterfly community in Panama, we compared the ability of adult butterflies from 54 species to control their body temperature across a range of air temperatures (thermal buffering ability), as well as assessing the critical thermal maxima for a subset of 24 species. Thermal buffering ability and tolerance were influenced by family, wing length, and wing colour, with Pieridae, and butterflies that are large or darker in colour having the strongest thermal bufferi

SUBMITTER: Ashe-Jepson E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10953451 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature