Macrophysiology of European ants in a warming world

Mallett, Sophie 2026. Macrophysiology of European ants in a warming world. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Climate change is causing global temperatures to rise, leading to declines in suitable habitats and resources for many organisms, changes to organisms’ activity patterns, and biodiversity loss. Importantly, however, the impacts of temperature are not uniform across different taxa, spatial or temporal scales. The field of macrophysiology has attempted to resolve this problem by exploring how organisms’ physiological traits can be used to predict their spatial and temporal distributions at large scales. To do this, conventional approaches measure physiological traits related to the minimum and maximum temperatures that an organism can physiologically tolerate. However, these conventional approaches to capturing thermal trait data fail to capture the broader effects of temperature on organismal performance and are too low-throughput to keep pace with rapid, climate-driven biodiversity loss. This thesis explores how the extraction of thermal traits in ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) can be upscaled from conventional methodologies to include broader aspects of thermal performance, such as those linked to movement, and how these thermal traits relate to macroecological patterns. Here, I analyse broad-scale patterns of phylogenetic and ecogeographic diversity in ant thermal traits and assess how ants might respond to climate change. Ants are a functionally important and phenotypically diverse taxonomic group that is highly sensitive to temperature change. Studying ants across broad spatial scales is therefore crucial for identifying large-scale patterns in ant thermal traits, which may help explain how ants will respond to ongoing climate change. Overall, the findings suggest that a combination of evolutionary history and ecogeographic variables shapes thermal performance in ants, and that ant thermal strategies broadly fall along axes of thermal specialism and heat tolerance. As environmental temperatures rise in the future, ants are predicted to have reduced cold-restriction and narrower thermal safety margins, indicating widespread changes to activity windows and the potential for changes to community structure and function.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Biosciences
Subjects:	Q Science > Q Science (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	9 October 2026
Last Modified:	02 Nov 2026 15:17
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/190113

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