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Rory Telemeco is an Assistant Professor of Ecological Physiology at California State University, Fresno.  He uses an integrative approach to study thermal physiology and ecology, stress physiology, evolutionary ecology, and global change biology, primarily using reptiles as model systems.  He will be presenting on his recent research exploring the mechanisms underlying thermal tolerance and performance in reptiles.

Recent efforts to model the fundamental niche and use it to predict organismal responses to global change have increased scrutiny on our understanding of why animals lose performance when exposed to extreme temperatures.  Leading hypotheses can be summarized as either failure of subcellular components (i.e. proteins or membranes) or organ systems (i.e. oxygen and capacity limited thermal tolerance) at high temperatures. Published data from decades of research on the physiology of amphibians and non-avian reptiles suggest that both mechanisms are important with hierarchical effects.  Thus, my colleagues and I proposed an integrated framework, which we call Hierarchical Mechanisms of Thermal Limitation (HMTL), to explain how subcellular and organ system failures interact to limit performance and set tolerance limits at high temperatures. I present both historic evidence for the HMTL hypothesis and results from recent experiments testing the novel predictions of the HMTL hypothesis in lizards.  I then explore the potential impact of failure to consider HMTL for the predictions of mechanistic niche models.  I hope that the HMTL framework spurs further research in diverse taxa, and facilitates both mechanistic forecasts of biological responses to climate change and exploration of the evolution of thermal performance.

Website: https://rory-telemeco.squarespace.com