Limited thermal tolerance in tropical insects and its genomic signature

Abstract Insects make up the majority of all animal species, with 70% occurring in the tropics 1 , yet the impacts of warming on tropical insects remain highly uncertain 2 . This stems from sparse, taxonomically biased data on thermal tolerance of tropical insects and an incomplete understanding of the underlying physiological mechanisms 3 . Here we compared environmental temperatures with field-measured upper and lower thermal tolerance limits of around 2,300 insect species along Afrotropical and Neotropical elevational gradients and identified genomic signatures of thermal tolerance across the insect tree of life. We show that thermal tolerances do not proportionally track environmental temperatures but…