ArticleThe Journal of animal ecology2023
Tropical butterflies use thermal buffering and thermal tolerance as alternative strategies to cope with temperature increase.
Article in The Journal of animal ecology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Butterflies with low thermoregulatory capacity show greatest upwards range shifts along an elevational gradient.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Evolutionary and environmental determinants of heat tolerance and acclimation capacity in herpetofauna.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Review
- Investigating the link between seed morphology and germination success: insights from European common wild oat (Avena fatua) populations.Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany) · 2026Article
- Amino Acid Frequency in the Proteome Is Not Associated With Realised Thermal Limit nor Dietary Niche Breadth in 35 Lepidoptera Species.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Latitudinal gradient of thermal safety margin in an Australian damselfly: implications for population vulnerability.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Article
- Clustered warming tolerances and the nonlinear risks of biodiversity loss on a warming planet.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- A multicontinental dataset of butterfly thermal physiological traits.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Population trends of insect pollinators in a species-rich tropical rainforest: stable trends but contrasting patterns across taxa.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Decline in diversity of tropical soil fauna under experimental warming.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Day-flying lepidoptera larvae have a poorer ability to thermoregulate than adults.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Tropical butterflies use thermal buffering and thermal tolerance as alternative strategies to cope with temperature increase.The Journal of animal ecology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
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 buffering ability, but Hesperiidae, small, and darker butterflies tolerating the highest temperatures. We identified an interaction between thermal buffering ability and physiological tolerance, where species with stronger thermal buffering abilities had lower thermal tolerance, and vice versa. This interaction implies that species with more stable body temperatures in the field may be more vulnerable to increases in ambient temperatures, for example heat waves associated with ongoing climate change. Our study demonstrates that tropical species employ diverse thermoregulatory strategies, which is also reflected in their sensitivity to temperature extremes.
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Registered trials
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