Professor David Atkinson Ph.D.

a) Temperature Effects on Body Size - The Temperature-Size Rule

99.9% of species rely on external sources for their body heat: these are ectotherms.

Body size and temperature have major impacts on organisms in nature.

The “Temperature-Size Rule” (TSR) (Atkinson 1994) is an inverse relationship between rearing temperature and final size in ectotherms. Understanding it remains a major challenge.

We have performed empirical tests, meta-analyses and developed new theory.

We have shown that warming causes greater size reduction in aquatic than terrestrial species, and that responses observed in controlled experiments are mirrored in the field across latitudes and seasons.

Experimental organisms: fish, Daphnia, insects, Bryozoa and protists.

Collaborator: Dr A. Hirst, Queen Mary Univ of London;

Funding: NERC

See: Atkinson 1994, Atkinson et al. 2003, Atkinson et al. 2006, Forster et al. 2012, Horne et al. 2015.

b) Limits to Adaptation

We are investigating how rapidly species can evolve, what the limits are to evolution, and how evolution of one species will affect the rest of the ecosystem with which it interacts.

These questions are being answered using large-scale freshwater mesocosm experiments that focus on the evolutionary response of the water flea Daphnia magna to an increased frequency of heat waves.

The work aims to advance understanding of how genetic diversity, plasticity and epigenetics contribute and combine to allow populations to adapt to environmental change and how this affects biodiversity and functioning of shallow freshwater ecosystems.

Collaborators: Dr Stew Plaistow, Prof Steve Paterson (Univ Liverpool); Prof Luc De Meester (KU Leuven); Dr Heidrun Feuchtmayr (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Lancaster)

Funding: NERC Highlight Grant, 2016-2020

See Geerts et al. 2015

Our quantification of a new metabolic scaling theory (MST) improves predictions of ecological influences on metabolically driven rates and scaling relationships.

Collaborators: Prof. D.S. Glazier, Juniata College USA; Dr A.G. Hirst, Queen Mary University of London, Dr A.J. Kerkhoff, Kenyon College, USA; Dr J.G. Okie, Arizona State University, USA

Funding: NCEAS (NSF, State of California, Univ. of California); Leverhulme Trust.

See: Killen et al. 2010, Hirst et al. 2014, Glazier et al. 2015.

a) Climate and Eutrophication Impacts on Ecosystem Functioning

Our large-scale ecosystem manipulations showed 4 °C warming plus nutrient loading had major impacts on Daphnia evolution and on ecosystem metabolic balance and community composition.

See: Moran et al. 2010, Feuchtmayr et al. 2009, Geerts et al. 2015.

Funding: European Union


b) Climate Impacts on Disease Dynamics.

We predict that differences in thermal sensitivity of rate of contact between pathogen and hosts will explain much variation in climate effects on epidemiology of diseases of ectotherms.

Thermal sensitivities of rates affecting parasite transmission have now been characterized for beetle: parasite system, for incorporation into our epidemiological model.

Collaborators: Prof. G. Hurst, Dr J. Ryder (postdoc); Prof. M. Boots, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Dr R. Knell, Queen Mary Univ of London.

Funding: NERC.