The role of physiology in Talbot's limiting factors of distribution

Species respond in diverse ways to warming, yet we know little about population-level variation across different habitats and large spatial scales. Mary Talbot’s work on ant distributions in Chicago was one of the first to link habitat with the ability to tolerate high temperatures, and myrmecologists often use her research as a springboard to study thermal physiology and geographic ranges. Here, we update Talbot’s fundamental idea that ants are either “adjusted to withstand” or “avoid” high temperatures by examining plastic and evolutionary responses to temperature across gradients of latitude and urbanization.