Responses of terrestrial ectothermic animals to microclimatic variation

Abstract

Understanding the effects of microclimatic variation on living beings requires, at least, three steps: 1) Knowing the principles for variation of climatic parameters and the responses of living beings to these variations. 2) Detecting climatic variation patterns in the scales within climate interacts with living beings, and response patterns of living beings. 3) Synthesizing predictive theories from this knowledge. Studies about the effects of temperature and AETs are extremely abundant and it is necessary to advance in the direction of producing a theoretical synthesis. In this paper, I apply the above mentioned steps for proposing a primordial theory about temperature effects on AETs, along several organizational levels. The same procedure may be applied to other climatic variables or ectotherm’s characteristics in a path of theoretic synthesis of increasing generality.