Temperature-size relations from the cellular-genomic perspective

Abstract

A family of empirically based ecological 'rules', collectively known as temperature-size rules, predicts larger body size in colder environments. This prediction is based on studies demonstrating that a wide range of ectotherms show increased body size, cell size or genome size in low-temperature habitats, or that individuals raised at low temperature become larger than conspecifics raised at higher temperature. There is thus a potential for reduction in size with global warming, affecting all levels from cell volume to body size, community composition and food webs. Increased body size may be obtained either by increasing the size or number of cells. Processes leading to changed cell size are of great interest from an ecological, physiological and evolutionary perspective. Cell size scales with fundamental properties such as genome size, growth rate, protein synthesis rates and metabolic activity, although the causal directions of these correlations are not clear. Changes in genome size will thus, in many cases, not only affect cell or body size, but also life-cycle strategies. Symmetrically, evolutionary drivers of life-history strategies may impact growth rate and thus cell size, genome size and metabolic rates. Although this goes to the core of many ecological processes, it is hard to move from correlations to causations. To the extent that temperature-driven changes in genome size result in significant differences among populations in body size, allometry or life-cycle events such as mating season, it could serve as a fast route to speciation. We offer here a novel perspective on the temperature-size rules from a 'bottom-up' perspective: how temperature may induce changes in genome size, and thus implicitly in cell size and body size of metazoans. Alternatively: how temperature-driven enlargement of cells also dictates genome-size expansion to maintain the genome-size to cell-volume ratio. We then discuss the different evolutionary drivers in aquatic versus terrestrial systems, and whether it is possible to arrive at a unifying theory that also may serve as a predictive tool related to temperature changes. This, we believe, will offer an updated review of a basic concept in ecology, and novel perspectives on the basic biological responses to temperature changes from a genomic perspective.