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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 2, 2025

Field-Based Thermal Physiology Assay: Cold Shock Recovery under Ambient Conditions

Field-Based Thermal Physiology Assay: Cold Shock Recovery under Ambient Conditions

Published on: March 9, 2021

Life in fluctuating environments.

Joey R Bernhardt^1,2, Mary I O'Connor³, Jennifer M Sunday²

¹Department of Aquatic Ecology, Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Überlandstrasse 133, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences

|November 2, 2020

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Organisms use feedback and feedforward mechanisms to maintain internal stability despite environmental changes. Understanding these processes is crucial for predicting how life will respond to human-altered environments.

Keywords:

anticipatory systems environmental noise environmental variability feedback feedforward phenotypic plasticity

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Area of Science:

Ecology
Physiology
Systems Biology

Background:

Environmental variability shapes life from individual organisms to entire ecosystems.
Organisms possess traits to detect, exploit, and predict environmental changes.
Feedback mechanisms maintain internal stability, while feedforward processes anticipate future environmental states.

Purpose of the Study:

To present a framework for understanding how feedback and feedforward mechanisms enable persistence in fluctuating environments.
To explore how these internal regulatory processes generate effects across organizational scales.
To highlight the importance of these mechanisms in the context of human-induced environmental change.

Main Methods:

Conceptual framework development.
Analysis of existing literature on organismal responses to environmental variability.
Integration of feedback and feedforward concepts across biological scales.

Main Results:

Feedback and feedforward mechanisms are fundamental to organismal persistence.
Organisms utilize environmental cues (daily, seasonal cycles) for anticipatory adjustments via feedforward processes.
Phenotypes like circadian clocks, social behavior, diapause, and migrations exemplify these strategies.

Conclusions:

Living systems integrate feedback and feedforward processes to navigate environmental fluctuations.
Human-induced environmental changes decouple environmental correlations, reducing cue reliability.
Recognizing these combined mechanisms is essential for predicting organismal and ecosystem responses to future environmental regimes.