Understanding temperature adaptation in tropical Andean butterflies

Understanding organisms' adaptation to their thermal environment is important for predicting responses to climate change. Tropical insects make up around half of all species on Earth, and yet very little is known about their thermal ecology. Butterflies are one of the best-studied insect groups with respect to thermal adaptation, but relatively little is known about the responses of tropical species to climate change.

The Heliconius butterflies have been extensively studied and there is good information about the distributions of species in this genus, but very little is known about what determines species ranges (e.g. temperature versus rainfall), or how ranges have shifted. Many of the species in the genus are found in and around the Andes and it seems likely that thermal adaptation plays a role in delimiting niches in this area, and in driving distributions to shift uphill, but this has not previously been investigated. Excellent genomic resources are available for Heliconius, which have been used to investigate genes underlying adaptation and speciation. This provides the opportunity to investigate thermal adaptation in this group at multiple levels, from genes to populations, species and communities, to investigate and predict responses to climate change.