Evolution of plasticity in the city: urban acorn ants can better tolerate more rapid increases in environmental temperature

Because cities contain high levels of impervious surfaces and diminished buffering effects of vegetation cover, urbanized environments can warm faster over the day and exhibit more rapid warming over space due to greater thermal heterogeneity in these environments. Whether organismal physiologies can adapt to these more rapid spatio-temporal changes in temperature rise within cities is unknown, and exploring these responses can inform not only how plastic and evolutionary mechanisms shape organismal physiologies, but also the potential for organisms to cope with urban development. Here, we examined how plasticity in thermal tolerance under faster and slower rates of temperature change might evolve in response to the more rapid spatio-temporal temperature rise in cities. We focused on acorn ants, a temperature-sensitive, ground-dwelling ant species that makes its home inside hollowed out acorns. We reared acorn ant colonies from urban and rural populations under a common garden design in the laboratory and assessed the thermal tolerances of F1 offspring workers using both fast (1°C min(−1)) and slow (0.2°C min(−1)) rates of temperature change. Relative to the rural population, the urban population exhibited higher heat tolerance when the temperature was increased quickly, providing evidence that temperature ramp-rate plasticity evolved in the urban population. This result was correlated with both faster rates of diurnal warming in urban acorn ant nest sites and greater spatial heterogeneity in environmental temperature across urban foraging areas. By contrast, rates of diurnal cooling in acorn ant nest sites were similar across urban and rural habitats, and correspondingly, we found that urban and rural populations responded similarly to variation in the rate of temperature decrease when we assessed cold tolerance. Our study highlights the importance of considering not only evolutionary differentiation in trait means across urbanization gradients, but also how trait plasticity might or might not evolve.