New paper linking mayfly mitochondrial function to thermal acclimation

A mayfly in a water drop (photo: J. Havird)

Some researchers get more excited about selfies than others!

Check out our new paper on testing the climate variability hypothesis in mitochondrial thermal acclimation of Rocky Mountain mayflies! This work was done in collaboration with Justin Havird at UT- Austin and Adam Chicco at Colorado State U and was included in a special issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - B. We found that at the mitochondrial level, thermal acclimation capacity decreased when acclimated to higher temperatures, but this was less so for low elevation populations that experience higher levels of thermal variation. Still, mitochondrial acclimation appeared to be generally greater than that measured at the whole-organism level suggesting that links between mitochondrial function and higher level phenotypes are complicated.