How hot is too hot and why is it too hot? Unravelling the physiology of how animals cope with warming environments can tell us a lot about their evolutionary history as well as their current (and future) habitats. One possible mechanism by which an animal's physiology could limit its heat tolerance is if high temperatures interfered with routine but important metabolic processes such as making energy, ATP, by the mitochondria. Copepods, which often live in splash pools above the high tide line, adapt to the peculiarities of their particular pools. The copepod Tigriopus californicus has made its home in rock pools from balmy Mexico to chilly northern California, and has adapted its mitochondria to the vastly differing climes. With beakers of these copepods, descended from various populations, available in the lab, Tim Healy and Ron Burton from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, compared how quickly the mitochondria from different populations of copepods made ATP when in warm water and how that related to each populations’ natural habitat to find out whether their mitochondria influenced what temperatures they tolerated and, in doing so, their natural habitat ranges.
For each population, the researchers isolated mitochondria from several individuals and provided them with all the materials they needed to make ATP. The team then compared how quickly the mitochondria did this at a range of temperatures from 20°C to a scorching 36°C, and found that the mitochondria from copepods from cold climates generally made ATP faster than those from warm climates, especially at temperatures below 25°C; although that was not surprising, because some animals such as copepods can counteract the natural slowing effect of cold temperatures on their metabolism. However, the northern population's mitochondria were also much more sensitive to high temperatures, as their ability to make ATP declined sharply when the temperature was above the mid-30s. Meanwhile, the mitochondria from southern copepods resisted the heat and happily made ATP at temperatures hot enough to hinder making ATP in the northern populations. Taken together, this suggested that the mitochondria of each population are best adjusted to make ATP at the temperatures that they would naturally encounter in the wild. Healy and Burton then turned their attention to figuring out whether the differences in mitochondrial physiology uncovered in the lab contributed to differences in heat tolerance in the wild.
The duo compared the temperature at which each population of copepods made ATP half as fast as normal with the temperature at which they stopped swimming, a sign that it was too hot for them, and discovered that the southern populations, whose mitochondria could churn out decent amounts of ATP at relatively high temperatures, also tended to keep swimming at hotter temperatures, supporting the idea that copepods hit their upper temperature limit when their mitochondria stop performing well. This suggested that having ‘southern style’ or ‘northern style’ mitochondria not only impacted which temperatures the copepods could make the most ATP, but also which temperatures they could survive in the wild.
Taken together, it is clear that northern populations of copepods like the cold, while southern populations like the heat, and how fast mitochondria can make ATP at these temperatures underlies at least some of this variation. But how copepod mitochondria react to heat does more than distinguish different populations – it also seems to set the maximum temperature where different populations can survive. As animals scramble to respond to the looming threat of climate change, understanding what sets the temperatures an animal can tolerate will be key to understanding why animals live where they do in the present and where they might live in the future.
