Microhabitat temperature variation combines with physiological variation to enhance thermal resilience of the intertidal mussel Mytilisepta virgata

1. Predicting the effects of rising temperature entails measuring both habitat thermal characteristics and the physiological variation of the species as it relates to this microhabitat variation; these two types of measurements can generate what is termed a “physiological landscape” for the species. Mapping the micro-scale physiological landscape across space and time, rather than relying on large-scale averages of temperature and means of thermal limits in a species, can allow more accurate estimates of an organism’s sensitivity to temperature change and support development of more refined models of the impacts of anthropogenic climate change that have higher predictive power.

2. We thus continually monitored the body (operative) temperature of the intertidal mussel Mytilisepta virgata in both sun-exposed and shaded microhabitats and determined the seasonal variations of cardiac performance of field-acclimatized and laboratory-acclimated mussels from different microhabitats for calc...