A fundamental challenge facing physiological ecologists is to understand how variation in life history at the whole-organism level might be linked to cellular function. Thus, because tropical birds have higher annual survival and lower rates of metabolism, we hypothesized that cells from tropical species would have greater cellular resistance to chemical injury than cells from temperate species. We cultured dermal fibroblasts from 26 tropical and 26 temperate species of birds and examined cellular resistance to cadmium, H(2)O(2), paraquat, thapsigargin, tunicamycium, methane methylsulfonate (MMS) and UV light. Using ANCOVA, we found that the values for the dose that killed 50% of cells (LD(50)) from tropical birds were significantly higher for H(2)O(2) and MMS. When we tested for significance using a generalized least squares approach accounting for phylogenetic relationships among species to model LD(50), we found that cells from tropical birds had greater tolerance for Cd, H(2)O(2), paraquat, tunicamycin and MMS than cells from temperate birds. In contrast, tropical birds showed either lower or no difference in tolerance to thapsigargin and UV light in comparison with temperate birds. These findings are consistent with the idea that natural selection has uniquely fashioned cells of long-lived tropical bird species to be more resistant to forms of oxidative and non-oxidative stress than cells from shorter-lived temperate species.