72 Part II Conditions and Resources

(a) (b) (c)

Performance of species
Reproduction

Individual growth

Individual survival

R R R R
G G G G
S S S S
Intensity of condition

Figure 3.1
Response curves illustrating the effects of a range of environmental conditions on individual survival (S), growth (G), and reproduction (R).
(a) Extreme conditions are lethal, less extreme conditions prevent growth, and only optimal conditions allow reproduction. (b) The condition is
lethal only at high intensities; the reproduction–growth–survival sequence still applies. (c) Similar to (b), but the condition is required by organisms,
as a resource, at low concentrations.

the organism is typically unaffected, but there is a threshold above which per-
formance decreases rapidly: first reproduction, then growth, and finally survival.
The third (Figure 3.1c), then, applies to conditions that are required by organisms
at low concentrations but become toxic at high concentrations. This is the case for
some minerals, such as copper and sodium chloride, that are essential resources
for growth when they are present in trace amounts but become toxic conditions
at higher concentrations.
effectively linear effects of
Of these three responses, the first is the most fundamental. It is accounted for,
temperature on rates of growth in part, by changes in metabolic effectiveness. For each 10°C rise in temperature,
and development for example, the rate of biological processes often roughly doubles, and thus
appears as an exponential curve on a plot of rate against temperature (Figure 3.2a).
The increase is brought about because high temperature increases the speed of
molecular movement and speeds up chemical reactions. For an ecologist, how-
ever, effects on individual chemical reactions are likely to be less important than
effects on rates of growth or development or on final body size, since these tend
to drive the core ecological activities of survival, reproduction and movement
(see Chapter 5). And when we plot rates of growth and development of whole
organisms against temperature, there is quite commonly an extended range over
which there are, at most, only slight deviations from linearity (Figure 3.2b, c).
Either way, at lower temperatures (though ‘lower’ varies from species to species,
as explained earlier) performance is likely to be impaired simply as a result of
metabolic inactivity.
temperature and final size
Together, rates of growth and development determine the final size of an
organism. For instance, for a given rate of growth, a faster rate of development
will lead to smaller final size. Hence, if the responses of growth and development
to variations in temperature are not the same, temperature will also affect final
size. In fact, development usually increases more rapidly with temperature than
does growth, such that, for a very wide range of organisms, final size tends to
decrease with rearing temperature (Figure 3.3).
These effects of temperature on growth, development and size may be of pract-
ical rather than simply scientific importance. Increasingly, ecologists are called upon
to predict. We may wish to know what the consequences would be, say, of a 2°C
rise in temperature resulting from global warming. We cannot afford to assume