Investigating the resilience of termite communities to logging and climate change in Borneo

This project set out to quantify the tolerance of termite communities to climate change, or more specifically, temperature and humidity change, two climatic variables that have been hypothesised to drive species distributions (particularly for small ectotherms such as termites). The data presented here are the tolerances of termites to increasing temperatures, and decreasing humidities. The thermal data was recorded by inserting termites into individual glass vials, placing those sealed vials into a water bath, and increasing the temperature until they could no longer function. This temperature was recorded, and taken as CTmax (Critical Thermal Maximum), for each individual termite. These data can be found in the TemperatureData worksheet. The humidity data was recorded slightly differently. Groups of termites (of the same genus) were weighed and placed in one of two types of glass vial. Dessicated vials also contained silica gel (and a barrier to prevent termite interaction with the gel) which reduced the humidity to an average of 30%. Control vials did not contain any silica gel and had an average humidity of 85%. These vials were removed at one of 5 time points, and the termites were weighed again, and weight change was recorded. This weight change was attributed to water loss. The body water data was used to calculate the proportion of body mass that was water, for multiple termite genera. This was done so that percentage of body water lost could be calculated for the humidity experiment, rather than an absolute value of water loss (as termites vary in size, using absolute values would cause false conclusions).

Authors

• Woon, Joel — Imperial College London
• Ewers, Rob
• Eggleton, Paul

Keywords

• Termites
• Climate
• Temperature
• Humidity
• Tolerance
• CTmax
• Ectotherms

Funders

• No funders recorded.

Permits

• No permits recorded.

Worksheets

Files

• template_JoelWoon_TermiteData.xlsx

Taxa

40 GBIF taxa, 0 sequence-derived taxa.