Thermal reaction norms can surmount evolutionary constraints: comparative evidence across leaf beetle species

One of the leitmotifs of the ecophysiological research on ectotherms is the variation and evolution of thermal reaction norms for biological rates. This long‐standing issue is crucial both for our understanding of life‐history diversification and for predicting the phenology of economically important species. A number of properties of the organism's thermal phenotype have been identified as potential constraints on the evolution of the rate–temperature relationship. This comparative study addresses several such constraints by testing whether the actual interspecific variation of thermal reaction norms across nearly hundred leaf beetle species agrees with the expected patterns. The results show that developmental rate and its temperature‐dependent parameters are similar in closely related species and that the variation pattern depends on the taxonomic scale, the thermal reaction norms being mostly parallel for the representatives of distant subclades but intersecting more often farther down the phylogenetic tree. The parallel shift disagrees with the putative ubiquity of a positive slope–threshold relationship, whereby thermal reaction norms should normally intersect, and even more contradicts with the common‐intersection hypothesis. The ability to develop in cooler conditions is not traded off at higher temperatures, which is an exception to the “warmer is better” principle. A comparison of high‐ and low‐quality data indicates that some of these discrepancies with earlier findings may stem from a likely presence of noise in previous analyses, which may have affected the variation patterns observed. Overall, the failure to support the universality of the predicted patterns suggests that the evolution of thermal reaction norms in leaf beetles has largely overcome the hypothesized constraints.