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Predicting Marine Teleost Responses To Ocean Warming And Pollution, Akila Harishchandra
Predicting Marine Teleost Responses To Ocean Warming And Pollution, Akila Harishchandra
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Ocean warming and pollution are two detrimental anthropogenic factors causing rapid marine ecosystem degradation recorded in the past decades. These factors alter the marine environment intolerable for many marine species, forcing them to either adapt or shift their contemporary habitat ranges to reduce the extinction risk embedded with environmental degradation. Estimating marine species’ habitat range shifts, and their potential for developing adaptive mechanisms are critical for ecosystem conservation and management, human health risk assessment, and climate change vulnerability assessments. Given that, for the first chapter of this thesis, we focused on developing a species distribution model (SDM) integrating marine species …
Comparative Energetics Of Mammalian Thermoregulatory Physiology, Ana M. Breit
Comparative Energetics Of Mammalian Thermoregulatory Physiology, Ana M. Breit
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Endothermy allows species to decouple body temperature from environmental
temperatures but does not equate to endothermic species maintaining those constant temperatures. Instead, heterothermy fluctuating body temperatures, both in and outside of torpor is common and allows endotherms to expand the limits of thermoneutrality. Thermolability is likely to be more common in the tropics and subtropics, where species live within or above their thermoneutral zone. My dissertation research focused on the heterothermic-homeothermic continuum, specifically quantifying where on the continuum different species fall at certain times and why those species have evolved to be at those points. I quantified the thermal profile …
Living On The Edge: Thermophysiology Of The Southern Flying Squirrel At Its Northern Range Margin, Vanessa R. Hensley
Living On The Edge: Thermophysiology Of The Southern Flying Squirrel At Its Northern Range Margin, Vanessa R. Hensley
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Climate change has the potential to upset entire ecological systems, making predictive models of the utmost importance. The incorporation of physiological parameters into predictive models not only bolsters their accuracy but also provides a mechanistic explanation for ecological changes already observed and those yet to come. North American flying squirrels, for example, have already experienced dramatic range shifts northward over recent decades, with climate change being the suspected driver. While other studies have focused on warming winter temperatures, I explored the hypothesis that rising summer temperatures were driving the observed range shifts. Unable to find a reliable population of the …