Pathways to survival in a hotter world

Descripción del proyecto

¿La fauna puede sobrevivir al calor?

A medida que aumenta la temperatura mundial, las olas de calor ejercen una presión cada vez mayor sobre las poblaciones animales, reduciendo su fertilidad y esperanza de vida y amenazando la biodiversidad. Sin embargo, los científicos aún carecen de conocimientos vitales sobre cómo afrontan los animales el calor extremo y si pueden adaptarse a tiempo. El proyecto HotLife, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, pretende cambiar esta situación. Centrándose en las aves, especialmente vulnerables a las muertes masivas inducidas por el calor, el equipo de HotLife estudiará cómo funciona la tolerancia al calor, si es hereditaria y si la plasticidad a corto plazo dificulta el rescate evolutivo a largo plazo. Mediante herramientas fisiológicas y genéticas de vanguardia, el proyecto descubrirá si la naturaleza ya está seleccionando la supervivencia al calor. Al revelar cómo, por qué y cuándo los animales no consiguen sobrevivir al calor, HotLife espera ayudar a la fauna salvaje a capear un mundo que se calienta rápidamente.

Objetivo

Global warming and heatwaves – hallmarks of climate change that are expected to worsen in the 21st century – diminish reproductive success and cause excess mortality in wild and domesticated animal populations. Yet, we still have sub-standard knowledge of almost all fundamental traits that medi-ate success or failure under climate change, and, for most animals, there are no data on the extent to which plasticity, local adaptation, or evolutionary change can alleviate the stress imposed by a hotter world. Collectively, therefore, the research field is at status quo. To mitigate this situation, HotLife will leverage my previous phenomenological studies on ontogenetic priming and plasticity of thermoregulatory capacity to generate novel knowledge on when and why animals fail in the heat, and whether plastic or evolutionary responses may render failure a less likely outcome in the future.

The main outcomes of HotLife will reveal:
1) How heat tolerance manifests, how much it can evolve, and whether plasticity halts evolutionary rescue;
2) Whether climate warming and climatic extremes directly or indirectly cuts life expectancy short; and
3) If the physiological basis for heat tolerance is inherited in the wild and if it is already being selected upon

I will achieve these ambitious goals by combining state-of-the-art thermal and sub-cellular physiology with intricate genomic techniques and powerful heritability analyses in captive and wild bird models – the endotherm group for which heat-induced mass mortality is most frequently reported. HotLife goes beyond the state-of-the-art, by i) bridging crucial knowledge gaps between heat failure in birds, its physiological basis, and its links to fitness and survival; ii) addressing the potential for rescue by plasticity or evolution from these effects; and iii) uncovering evidence for local adaptation and heritability of heat tolerance in the wild.