Will the impact of juvenile temperatures on fertility alter how species respond to climate change?

Climate change will cause an increase in extreme temperatures. The impacts of climate change are often estimated by examining the temperatures that kill animals. However, most animals lose their fertility at temperatures far lower than their fatal limits. So understanding how temperature impacts on fertility may be critical for predicting how species distributions will change over future decades.

Juvenile stages of many invertebrates may be particularly vulnerable to extreme temperatures, as they often cannot disperse well to move to thermally preferred habitats. Hence understanding how extreme juvenile temperatures impact on fertility will have a major impact on predicting responses to climate change. However, the impact of temperature on fertility has never been systematically investigated.

Here, we will examine the impact of extreme temperatures on juvenile Drosophila and the consequences for adult fertility. We will assay the ability of up to 50 species to maintain fertility in the face of extreme temperatures, enabling us to examine the traits that make species particularly vulnerable to climate driven sterility. For example, tropical rainforest species typically encounter very stable temperatures, and may be easily rendered sterile, whereas desert species may be highly resistant to extreme temperature variation. Many of the species we will study have published genomes, so we will be able to use bioinformatics to investigate the genetics underlying the maintenance of fertility after thermal shocks.

The project will combine laboratory work, behavioural assays, microscopy and dissections, bioinformatic analyses, and fieldwork. The project will run alongside a postdoc and technician on a related £470000 NERC grant