Adaptation of Drosophila species to climate change — A literature review since 2003

Abstract

Global climate warming has been exerting impacts on agricultural pests. Pests also take some strategies to adapt to climate change. Understanding such adaptation could benefit more accurate predictions and integrated management of pest. However, adaptation to climate change has not been widely investigated in agricultural pests but has been well documented in model species, Drosophila, and reviewed by Hoffmann before 2003. To provide recent progress and references for agricultural entomologists who interested in thermal biology, here we have reviewed literatures since 2003 about adaptation to temperature changes under climate change. We mainly summarized thermal adaptation of Drosophila (especially to high temperatures) from three aspects, behaviors, plastic responses and micro-evolution and discussed how Drosophila increases their heat tolerance through these three mechanisms. Finally, we summarized the measures of thermotolerance and concluded the main progress in recent decade about the behavioral thermoregulation, mortality risks driven by limited evolutionary and plastic response under climate change, geographic distribution based on basal rather than plastic thermotolerance. We propose future work focus on better understanding adaptation of organisms including agricultural pests to climate change.

Keywords

• global warming
• phenotypic plasticity
• acclimation
• parental effect
• thermal tolerance