Data from: Pace of life syndrome under warming and pollution: integrating life history, behavior and physiology across latitudes

To fully comprehend and predict the impact of drivers of global change
such as climate warming and pollution, integrated multi-trait approaches
are needed. As organismal traits are often correlated, responses to
stressors are expected to induce coordinated changes in many traits. A
promising framework to study this is the pace-of-life syndrome (POLS),
which predicts the integration of life-history, behavioral and
physiological traits along a fast-slow continuum. Using an integrative
multi-trait approach we evaluated the presence of a POLS both within and
across latitudes and how POLS patterns are affected by warming and metal
pollution. We studied this in Ischnura elegans damselfly larvae of
replicated low-and high latitude populations that strongly differ in
voltinism (3-4 generations per year vs. 1 every two years) reared in a
common-garden experiment at two temperatures. Across latitudes, life
history, behavior and physiology covaried in accordance with the POLS,
with the fast-paced low-latitude damselflies characterized by a fast
growth rate, high activity and more explorative and risk taking behavior,
fast metabolic rate and low investment in immune function (activity of
phenoloxidase). This fast POLS strategy was associated with a higher
sensitivity to metal exposure and a higher vulnerability to predation.
Warming caused opposite responses between the latitudes consistent with
differential thermal adaptation in growth rate, behavior and oxidative
stress parameters. Despite this, damselflies of both latitudes showed a
consistent pattern in phenotypic correlations among traits that, moreover
was not affected by warming and metal exposure. Within latitudes there was
no full support for the POLS. More active larvae were more explorative and
risk taking, which aligned with the fast-slow life-history axis, but less
strong than at the across-latitude level. Physiological traits were also
integrated within latitudes, yet there was no unambiguous coupling with
the fast-slow life-history continuum. The consistent syndrome structure,
if underpinned by genetic correlations, may restrict the independent
evolution of individual traits, yet may not necessarily constrain adaptive
evolution of integrated trait sets. This is because the covariance pattern
was to a large extent similar across latitudes and within latitudes,
suggesting adaptive trait integration guiding adaptive evolution of trait
sets along the fast-slow continuum.