Habitat temperature is a major determinant of performance and activity in fish. I examined the relationships between thermal response metrics describing growth (optimal growth temperature [OGT] and final temperature preferendum [FTP]), survival (upper incipient lethal temperature [UILT] and critical thermal maximum [CTMax]), and reproduction (optimum spawning [OS] and optimum egg development temperature [OE]) for 173 North American freshwater fish species. All metrics were highly correlated and associated with thermal preference class, reproductive guild and spawning season. Controlling for phylogeny resulted in an overall decrease in correlation strength, varying with metric pair relationship. ANCOVA and Bayesian hierarchical models were utilized to assess the influence of phylogeny on metric pair relationships. For both methods, FTP based metric pairs were weakly correlated within taxonomic family. Strong within family associations were found for reproduction metrics OS-OE. These results suggest that evolutionary history plays an important role in determining species thermal response to their environment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/32574 |
| Date | 25 July 2012 |
| Creators | Hasnain, Sarah |
| Contributors | Shuter, Brian |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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