Ant thermal tolerance along a field-forest gradient in Guelph, Ontario
Often, we find species where they are because of some abiotic variable that dictates where a species can and cannot be. While temperature is a well-known driver of species distributions, it is not always the causal factor. One way to find more evidence of the direct effects of temperature on the distribution of any given species is to measure some physiological traits that are known to respond to those effects, and to then map how they change with the community and connect that information to the environmental temperature changes. In this chapter, I studied the relationship between thermal tolerance, environmental temperature, and time for an ant community in a field-forest gradient in Guelph, Ontario. I found that though thermal tolerance changed across the season (a known phenomenon for ants), those changes did not track changes in environmental temperatures very well, which implies that other covariates are dictating changes in thermal tolerance. We did, however, find that the field and forest communities had different thermal tolerances in a predictable way. These results suggest that factors that are not necessaryly correlated to temperature will play a disproportional impact on the ability of ants to tolerance temperature swings across the season. You can read more about my findings here.