Effects of desiccation and starvation on thermal tolerance and the heat-shock response in forest ants

Andrew D. Nguyen, Kerri DeNovellis, Skyler Resendez, Jeremy D. Pustilnik, Nicholas J. Gotelli, Joel D. Parker, Sara Helms Cahan

Temperature increases associated with global climate change are likely to be accompanied by additional environmental stressors such as desiccation and food limitation, which may alter how temperature impacts organismal performance. To investigate how interactions between stressors influence thermal tolerance in the common forest ant, Aphaenogaster picea, we compared the thermal resistance of workers to heat shock with and without pre-exposure to desiccation or starvation stress. Knockdown (KD) time at 40.5 °C of desiccated ants was reduced 6% compared to controls, although longer exposure to desiccation did not further reduce thermal tolerance. Starvation, in contrast, had an increasingly severe effect on thermal tolerance: at 21 days, average KD time of starved ants was reduced by 65% compared to controls. To test whether reduction in thermal tolerance results from impairment of the heat-shock response, we measured basal gene expression and transcriptional induction of two heat-shock proteins (hsp70 and hsp40) in treated and control ants. We found no evidence that either stressor impaired the Hsp response: both desiccation and starvation slightly increased basal Hsp expression under severe stress conditions and did not affect the magnitude of induction under heat shock. These results suggest that the co-occurrence of multiple environmental stressors predicted by climate change models may make populations more vulnerable to future warming than is suggested by the results of single-factor heating experiments.