Predicting responses to climate change: ecophysiology of the common brown butterfly, Heternoympha merope

Abstract

Understanding the processes through which climate limits the distribution and abundance of organisms is a fundamental question in ecology, and is particularly important in light of recent, on-going, climate change. Variation in temperature in particular, can have substantial impacts on the fitness and survival of organisms, through its ubiquitous effects on biological rates. However, animals have the capacity to construct their own thermal environment through behaviour, and so to understand the impacts of temperature on species’ ecology, interactions between the organism and its environment must be accounted for. Holometabolous insects make fascin..