Heat tolerance is more variable than cold tolerance across species of Iberian lizards after controlling for intraspecific variation

The widespread observation that heat tolerance is less variable than cold tolerance (‘cold-tolerance asymmetry’) leads to the prediction that species exposed to temperatures near their thermal maxima should have reduced evolutionary potential for adapting to climate warming. However, the prediction is largely supported by species-level global studies based on single estimates of both physiological metrics per taxon. We ask if cold-tolerance asymmetry holds for Iberian lizards after accounting for intraspecific variation in critical thermal maxima (CTmax) and minima (CTmin). To do so, we quantified CTmax and CTmin for 58 populations of 15 Iberian lizard species (299 individuals). Then, we randomly selected one population from each study species (population sample = 15 CTmax and CTmin values), tested for variance homoscedasticity across species, and repeated the test for thousands of population samples as if we had undertaken the same study thousands of times, each time sampling one ...