Data for: Cold adaptation does not handicap warm tolerance in the most abundant Arctic seabird

Arctic birds and mammals are physiologically adapted to survive in cold
environments but live in the fastest-warming region on the planet. They
should therefore be most threatened by climate change. Combining modelling
and physiological measurements in dovekies (Alle alle) from East
Greenland, we demonstrate that cold adaptation in this small Arctic
seabird does not handicap acute tolerance to air temperatures more than 10
°C above their current maximum. We predict that climate warming will
reduce the energetic costs of thermoregulation for dovekies, but their
capacity to cope with rising temperatures will be constrained by water
intake and salt balance. Dovekies evolved 15 million years ago, and their
thermoregulatory physiology might reflect adaptation to paleoclimates that
were substantially warmer than the present-day.