Substantial heat tolerance acclimation capacity in tropical thermophilic snails, but to what benefit?

The theory for thermal acclimation of ectotherms suggests that (1) heat tolerance is traded off for thermal acclimation in thermophilic species and that (2) plasticity is constrained in tropically distributed ectotherms, which commonly experience relatively thermally stable environments. We observed substantial heat tolerance plasticity in a test of this theory using tropical, thermophilic marine intertidal snails that inhabit extremely hot and highly variable thermal environments. The implication of these results is that plasticity selection is largely driven by habitat temperature conditions irrespective of basal heat tolerance or latitude. However, heat tolerance of field-fresh snails was comparable with that of laboratory warm-acclimated snails, suggesting that snails in the field may often be unable to improve heat hardening with further environmental warming. These findings suggest that field referencing is crucial to using laboratory-measured acclimation capacity when inferring climate warming vulnerability in ectotherms, and overall they question how well current thermal biology theory predicts the outcomes of global change in intertidal environments.