No water, no eggs: insights from a warming outdoor mesocosm experiment

Insects are susceptible to dehydration and change in atmospheric humidity could affect their fitness. To understand the impacts of humidity changes on insect’s reproductive fitness we released an outcrossed Drosophila melanogaster population to outdoor mesocosm units and tracked their fecundity over ninety days under progressively developing summer season. The study was carried out in a tropical urban garden. Often temperature has been found to be the key player in changes in reproductive output in a considerable number of laboratory based studies. Our work suggested that temperature and humidity interactions determine the physiological state of an organism which could untimely impact organismal fitness in a given environmental set-up. This work suggested that fecundity in Drosophila populations was significantly influenced by relative humidity and its interaction with temperature. This together suggested that while temperature was an important parameter for fecundity, relative humidity...