Physiology and Global Climate Change

Abstract

The analysis of how physiology affects the distribution and abundance of animals in nature has advanced along with the rest of physiology, finding its origins in the Law of the Minimum (1) and the Law of Tolerance (2). Two seminal advances were the reframing of these laws in terms of not just survival but the capacity of animals to be active (3) and recognizing the need to extend the study of the relevant physiology outside of the laboratory and into free-ranging organisms in nature (4). These advances in turn led to the explicit incorporation of principles of mass and energy exchange between organisms and their environment in nature [since termed biophysical ecology (5)] and of population and evolutionary biology [now termed evolutionary physiology (6, 7)]. Physiological analysis of animal distribution and abundance continues to reinvent itself with the incorporation of molecular, genomic, and systems approaches (8) and now finds a new role as it elucidates the consequences of rapid climate change. These efforts synergize with a growing recognition that rapid evolution in natural populations can occur on ecological timescales and hence affect ecological interactions and community dynamics (9).