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Even quick freezes or heat waves that don't last long can affect what organisms can live in an area. Image by Redmarkviolinist.

Have you ever stood out barefoot on the concrete in the summer heat? Your first step doesn’t feel so bad, but after a few minutes it feels like your feet are melting into the sidewalk. That’s because the temperature that your feet can handle depends on whether you will experience it for five seconds or five minutes. In other words, the duration of exposure is just as important as the temperature itself.

This idea is important for building mechanistic models, because sometimes environments become very hot or very cold for short periods of time. Just because an animal can’t tolerate a temperature for a long period doesn’t mean that it can’t tolerate this temperature for shorter periods. Similarly, just because an animal can tolerate the average temperature of a habitat doesn’t mean that it can tolerate the extreme highs or lows.

Exploring the amounts of time that animals can tolerate certain temperatures enables scientists to create more detailed pictures of the conditions that a species needs to survive. And, when predicting how animals will react to climate change, scientists need to consider whether animals will experience the highest and lowest temperatures in their environments for longer or shorter periods.

Just because an animal can tolerate the average temperature of a habitat doesn’t mean that it can tolerate the extreme highs or lows. Images by Hamid Soufi, Mhare, and Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.

Additional images are from Wikimedia. Barefoot image by Yarkoski1012.