Carmen da Silva

Carmen da Silva
Monash University (Australia) · School of Biological Sciences, Clayton

PhD

About

25
Publications
3,434
Reads
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226
Citations
Introduction
I research the adaptive capacity of insects (with a focus on Australian native bees) to climate change using experimental biology, comparative physiology and macroecology.
Additional affiliations
July 2015 - May 2019
University of Queensland
Position
  • Lecturer
Description
  • Tutored 3rd year Animal Behaviour, 2nd year Statistics, 2nd year Zoology, 2nd year Evolution, and first year Biology
January 2015 - June 2019
Flinders University
Position
  • Demonstrator
February 2012 - July 2015
Flinders University
Position
  • Supervised Study Session Leader
Education
June 2019 - June 2019
University of Queensland
Field of study
  • Ecophysiology
February 2011 - November 2014
Flinders University
Field of study
  • Biology

Publications

Publications (25)
Article
Full-text available
Butterflies serve as key indicators of climate change impacts such as shifts in emergence timing and shifts in geographic range and distribution. However, the development of commonly used ecological forecasts based on butterfly physiological tolerance of temperature change has lagged behind that of other taxonomic groups. Here, we provide a series...
Article
Full-text available
Coadaptation of mitochondrial and nuclear genes is essential for proper cellular function. When populations become isolated, theory predicts that they should maintain mito‐nuclear coadaptation in each population, even as they diverge in genotype. Mito‐nuclear incompatibilities may therefore arise when individuals from populations with divergent co‐...
Article
Full-text available
Climatic factors are known to shape the expression of social behaviours. Likewise, variation in social behaviour can dictate climate responses. Understanding interactions between climate and sociality is crucial for forecasting vulnerability and resilience to climate change across animal taxa. These interactions are particularly relevant for taxa l...
Article
Full-text available
Species are often expected to shift their distributions either poleward or upslope to evade warming climates and colonise new suitable climatic niches. However, from 18‐years of fixed transect monitoring data on 88 species of butterfly in the midwestern United States, we show that butterflies are shifting their centroids in all directions, except t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Determining the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that underpin patterns of species richness across elevational gradients is a key question in evolutionary ecology, and can help to understand species extinction risk under changing climates. In the tropical montane islands of Fiji, there are 28 species of endemic bee in the subgenus Lasioglossu...
Preprint
The resilience of ecosystem function under global climate change is governed by individual species vulnerabilities and the functional groups they comprise. Yet it remains unclear whether the species that contribute to different functional processes which underpin ecosystem function exhibit differential vulnerability to climate change. We used exist...
Article
Full-text available
Physiological traits are often used for vulnerability assessments of organismal responses to climate change. Trait values can change dramatically over the life cycle of organisms but are typically assessed at a single developmental stage. Reconciling ontogenetic changes in physiological traits with vulnerability assessments often reveals early life...
Preprint
Species are often expected to shift their distributions poleward to evade warming climates. However, from 18 years of fixed transect monitoring data on 88 species of butterfly in the midwestern United States, we show that butterflies are shifting their centroids in all directions, except towards regions that are becoming warmer. Butterflies shifted...
Article
Full-text available
Decades of research have illuminated the underlying ingredients that determine the scope of evolutionary responses to climate change. The field of evolutionary biology therefore stands ready to take what it has learned about influences upon the rate of adaptive evolution—such as population demography, generation time, and standing genetic variation...
Article
Full-text available
Studying rapid biological changes accompanying the introduction of alien organisms into native ecosystems can provide insights into fundamental ecological and evolutionary theory. While powerful, this quasi-experimental approach is difficult to implement because the timing of invasions and their consequences are hard to predict, meaning that baseli...
Article
The resilience of ecosystem function under global climate change is governed by individual species vulnerabilities and the functional groups they contribute to (e.g. decomposition, primary production, pollination, primary, secondary and tertiary consumption). Yet it remains unclear whether species that contribute to different functional groups, whi...
Article
The response of bees to changing environmental temperatures has implications for pollination in natural and agricultural systems, with rising average temperatures and increased environmental stochasticity predicted to cause pollinator population declines. A growing body of evidence for the role of native bees in crop pollination suggests that under...
Preprint
Full-text available
Temperature and water availability are hypothesised to be important abiotic drivers of the evolution of metabolic rates and gas exchange patterns, respectively. Specifically, the metabolic cold adaptation hypothesis (MCA) predicts that cold environments select for faster metabolic rates to counter the thermodynamics of biochemical reactions while t...
Preprint
Full-text available
The resilience of ecosystem function under global climate change is governed by individual species vulnerabilities and the functional groups they contribute to (e.g. decomposition, primary production, pollination, primary, secondary and tertiary consumption). Yet it remains unclear whether species that contribute to different functional groups, whi...
Article
Anthropogenic climate change and invasive species are two of the greatest threats to biodiversity, affecting the survival, fitness and distribution of many species around the globe. Invasive species are often expected to have broad thermal tolerances, be highly plastic, or have high adaptive potential when faced with novel environments. Tropical is...
Article
Full-text available
Rate of colour change and background matching capacity are important functional traits for avoiding predation and hiding from prey. Acute changes in environmental temperature are known to impact the rate at which animals change colour, and therefore may affect their survival. Many ectotherms have the ability to acclimate performance traits such as...
Article
Full-text available
Most marine fish species disperse during a planktonic larval stage where individuals exhibit variation in pelagic duration, growth rate and settlement size. Extreme predation risk is predicted to select for rapid growth rates and decreased pelagic duration as a strategy for increasing survival to settlement. How larval traits affect post-metamorphi...
Article
Full-text available
The co-evolution of acclimation capacity and thermal performance breadth has been a contentious issue for decades, and little is known regarding the extent to which acclimation alters the shape of acute thermal performance curves. Current acclimation theory suggests that when daily variation is large and unpredictable ectotherms should not acclimat...
Article
Thermal physiology changes as organisms grow and develop, but we do not understand what causes these ontogenetic shifts. According to the theory of oxygen- and capacity-limited thermal tolerance, an organism’s heat tolerance should change throughout ontogeny as its ability to deliver oxygen varies. As insects grow during an instar, their metabolic...
Article
Full-text available
Obligate social parasites of Hymenoptera, known as inquilines, have received enormous attention due to the elaborate adaptations they exhibit for exploiting their hosts, and because they have frequently been used to infer sympatric speciation. Their population biology can be difficult to infer as they are both rare and difficult to extract from hos...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies suggest an alarming decline in pollinators across many regions of the world due to multiple factors. One potential factor is climate change, which poses both direct and indirect threats to pollinator popula- tions. To help ameliorate the impact of declining populations on the func- tion of ecological and agricultural systems, there i...
Article
Full-text available
Communal behaviour is a form of social behaviour where two or more females nest together and have no reproductive hierarchies. Communal behaviour has often been regarded as an evolutionary ‘stepping stone’ to more complex forms of sociality involving castes, as well as a social form derived from solitary behaviour with no further evolution towards...
Article
During the last 150 years, incursions of non-native species have been prevalent throughout the South West Pacific. The allodapine bee, Braunsapis puangensis (Cockerell) (Xylocopinae: Allodapini), was introduced to Fiji between 1965 and 2003, most likely from India. Until very recently, little was known about its dispersal ability and subsequent geo...

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