Why is life so variable?

​We often think about cold-blooded animals like insects as simply dependent on whatever temperature the air happens to be.  Indeed, even biologists trying to predict how our changing climate will affect insects, often assume that they can use temperatures from weather stations and climate models to predict the temperatures that organisms will experience.  

By measuring the temperature of our crickets using infra-red cameras and sensors, we have found that they can raise their body temperature as much as 20 degrees above ambient by basking in the sun.  What’s more, when we did an experiment where we shaded some of their burrows, they either abandoned the burrow altogether (if it was completely in the shade) or they increased the time they spend in the sun (when we used mesh to reduce the strength of sunshine).  This reveals that insects are actively managing their temperature using sunshine.  To properly understand how changes in climate will affect ecosystems we need to include changes in cloud cover as well as in temperature.

Read our paper on this work here