Abstract
To study behavioral thermoregulation, it is useful to use thermal sensors and physical models to collect environmental temperatures that are used to predict organism body temperature. Many techniques involve expensive or numerous types of sensors (cast copper models, or temperature, humidity, radiation, and wind speed sensors) to collect the microhabitat data necessary to predict body temperatures. Expense and diversity of requisite sensors can limit sampling resolution and accessibility of these methods. We compare body temperature predictions of small lizards from iButtons, DS18B20 sensors, and simple copper models, in both laboratory and natural conditions. Our aim was to develop an inexpensive yet accurate method for body temperature prediction. Either method was applicable given appropriate parameterization of the heat transfer equation used. The simplest and cheapest method was DS18B20 sensors attached to a small recording computer. There was little if any deficit in precision or accuracy compared to other published methods. We show how the heat transfer equation can be parameterized, and it can also be used to predict body temperature from historically collected data, allowing strong comparisons between current and previous environmental temperatures using the most modern techniques. Our simple method uses very cheap sensors and loggers to extensively sample habitat temperature, improving our understanding of microhabitat structure and thermal variability with respect to small ectotherms. While our method was quite precise, we feel any potential loss in accuracy is offset by the increase in sample resolution, important as it is increasingly apparent that, particularly for small ectotherms, habitat thermal heterogeneity is the strongest influence on transient body temperature.
Highlights
With the threat of climate change, thermal ecology studies have never been more urgent
We demonstrate our model in the laboratory and field, test its accuracy against real lizard body temperature, and demonstrate optimization of the only model parameter, K, which relates the size and mass of the sensor/physical model to the size and mass of the organism being modeled
We used a simple heat transfer equation to transform operative temperature to lizard body temperature, and it is clear that a given system must be calibrated to lizard size, it seems unimportant whether this is done under field or laboratory conditions
Summary
With the threat of climate change, thermal ecology studies have never been more urgent. Studies typically describe the thermal quality of the environment in terms of “operative environmental temperature” (Te): the steady-state temperature of an object with the same size and shape as the focal organism, with zero heat capacity. The “object” used to measure Te ranges from detailed physical models that mimic the organism made of copper or plastic, to simple copper tubes, PVC tubes, iButtons, HOBOs, and Tidbits (Bakken 1976; Hertz et al 1993; Vitt and Sartorius 1999; Dzialowski and O’Connor 2001; Shine and Kearney 2001; Dzialowski 2005). Complex mathematical models predict body temperature from first principles or rely on high-dimensional data sets collected by numerous sensors (Christian and Weavers 1996; Kearney 2006; Fei et al 2012a; Barton et al 2014). We aim to improve the accessibility of predicting body temperature of small reptiles using a simple and cheap method
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