Tadpoles Develop Elevated Heat Tolerance in Urban Heat Islands Regardless of Sex
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The ability of wildlife to endure the effects of high temperatures is increasingly important for biodiversity conservation under climate change and spreading urbanization. Organisms living in urban heat islands can have elevated heat tolerance via phenotypic or transgenerational plasticity or microevolution. However, the prevalence and mechanisms of such thermal adaptations are barely known in aquatic organisms. Furthermore, males and females can differ in heat tolerance, which may lead to sex-biased mortality, yet it is unknown how sex differences in thermal biology influence urban phenotypic divergence. To address these knowledge gaps, we measured critical thermal maxima (CT max ) in male and female agile frog ( Rana dalmatina ) tadpoles captured from warm urban ponds and cool woodland ponds, and in a common-garden experiment where embryos collected from both habitat types were raised in the laboratory. We found higher CT max in urban-dwelling tadpoles compared to their counterparts living in woodland ponds. This difference was reversed in the common-garden experiment: tadpoles originating from urban ponds had lower CT max than tadpoles originating from woodland ponds. We found no effect of sex on CT max or its difference between habitats. These results demonstrate that aquatic amphibian larvae can respond to the urban heat island effect with increased heat tolerance similarly to other, mostly terrestrial taxa studied so far, and that phenotypic plasticity may be the main driver of this response. Our findings also suggest that heat-induced mortality may be independent of sex in tadpoles, but research is needed in many more taxa to explore potentially sex-dependent urban thermal responses.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it