Impact of experimental thermal amplitude on ectotherm performance: Adaptation to climate change variability?

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 (24-24 degrees C, 27-21 degrees C and 32-16 degrees 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. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.