The power of diet – the effect of different types of diet on the plastic body size response to temperature

Description

Agata Burzawa, Katarzyna Potera, and Aleksandra Walczyńska present a 2026 journal article testing whether diet changes how tiny animals shrink as temperatures rise. Many cold-blooded animals mature smaller when warm, a pattern called the temperature-size rule. The team raised three clones of a rotifer, a microscopic water animal, with different heat preferences, each at four temperatures on three laboratory diets.

Diet changed the pattern, but unevenly across its parts. The lower temperature limit, where growth switches from negative to positive, shifted most with diet. The upper optimum temperature barely moved. The strength of the shrinking response also varied by food. The authors conclude that nutrition can bend thermal growth rules in different directions for different traits, so temperature effects cannot be read off without knowing what the animal eats.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/PMC13275613