Climate change does not only alter where animals can live. It can also change the pace at which their bodies use energy. A new global meta-analysis suggests that this physiological effect may be especially pronounced for terrestrial invertebrates and for species living at higher latitudes.
Published in Nature Communications on 25 September 2026, the study brought together existing evidence on the thermal sensitivity and plasticity of metabolic rates in invertebrates across aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The researchers then used those relationships to estimate how metabolism could change under future warming.
The headline projection is striking. Even under the relatively modest CMIP5 RCP2.6 climate scenario, the analysis forecast increases in metabolic rate of up to 26.6% for aquatic invertebrates and up to 43.9% for terrestrial invertebrates. The study therefore points to a potentially important physiological dimension of climate risk that differs substantially between environments and across latitude.
Why metabolism matters in a warming world
Invertebrates are ectotherms, meaning that their body temperature and many physiological processes are strongly influenced by environmental temperature. As temperature rises within a tolerable range, biochemical reactions and energy use generally accelerate. That can affect respiration, feeding, growth, reproduction and the amount of energy available for other biological functions.
This makes metabolic rate more than an individual-level trait. When temperature changes metabolism across large populations of insects, crustaceans, molluscs, worms and other invertebrates, the consequences can propagate through food webs, decomposition, nutrient cycling, pollination and other ecosystem processes.
The central challenge is that species do not respond identically to warming. Organisms can differ in thermal sensitivity, and some can adjust their physiology through acclimation or other forms of plasticity. A global forecast therefore requires more than assuming that every invertebrate’s metabolism rises by the same amount for every degree of warming.
A global meta-analysis of thermal sensitivity
Milad Shokri and colleagues assembled a global dataset from previously published research on invertebrate metabolic responses to temperature. Their goal was to estimate thermal sensitivity, meaning the degree to which metabolic rate changes with temperature, and metabolic plasticity, meaning the capacity for that response to be modified by environmental history or acclimation.
The researchers compared aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates and examined how the observed responses varied geographically. This ecosystem comparison matters because water and air create very different thermal environments. Aquatic organisms often experience temperature changes differently from organisms exposed to the atmosphere, while oxygen availability, moisture and the physical properties of the surrounding medium can alter the physiological consequences of warming.
The analysis also considered latitude and climatic conditions. Rather than treating location as a simple map coordinate, the study used geography to ask whether organisms from colder, more variable environments respond differently from those living in warmer and more thermally stable climates.
Finally, the estimated relationships were combined with projected climate change under CMIP5 RCP2.6. RCP2.6 represents a comparatively low radiative forcing pathway, so the resulting projections should not be read as a worst-case warming scenario. Instead, they show that substantial physiological changes can emerge even under a relatively modest climate pathway.
Terrestrial invertebrates were more temperature-sensitive
The clearest ecosystem-level result was that aquatic invertebrates showed a lower metabolic response to temperature than terrestrial invertebrates. In practical terms, the same broad process of warming was associated with a stronger acceleration of metabolism on land than in water.
That difference is important because climate vulnerability is often discussed through changes in habitat suitability, geographic range or lethal temperature thresholds. The new analysis highlights another pathway. An organism can remain below an immediately lethal temperature while still experiencing a substantial increase in the energetic cost of maintaining its body.
Higher metabolic demand is not automatically harmful. Faster metabolism can support faster activity or development when food, water, oxygen and other resources are sufficient. But the same increase can become costly when resources do not rise alongside energy demand. The ecological outcome therefore depends on whether organisms can acquire enough energy and whether other environmental constraints intensify at the same time.
Latitude sharpened the contrast
The researchers found that thermal sensitivity increased with latitude in both aquatic and terrestrial systems, but the increase was steeper among terrestrial invertebrates. Species from higher latitudes were therefore predicted to show stronger metabolic responses to warming, particularly on land.
This result complicates a common intuition that organisms already living in the warmest places must always be the most physiologically vulnerable to additional warming. Tropical species can certainly face narrow thermal safety margins, but this study examined a different quantity: how strongly metabolism responds to temperature. On that measure, cold-climate and high-latitude invertebrates can be highly sensitive.
The distinction matters. Thermal vulnerability has several dimensions, including proximity to lethal limits, capacity for acclimation, metabolic sensitivity, access to cooler microhabitats and the availability of food and water. A species can score differently on each dimension.
Warm, stable climates were associated with greater plasticity
The meta-analysis also found an important counterpoint. Invertebrates inhabiting warm and relatively stable climates showed greater capacity for metabolic plasticity that could counteract some temperature effects. By contrast, colder and more variable climates were associated with heightened thermal sensitivity, especially in terrestrial ecosystems.
Plasticity can act as a physiological buffer because an organism exposed to a new thermal regime may adjust how its metabolism responds. But plasticity should not be interpreted as unlimited protection. Acclimation has boundaries, can carry energetic costs and may not keep pace with the magnitude or speed of environmental change.
The study therefore separates two related questions. The first is how strongly metabolism initially responds to temperature. The second is how much organisms can modify that response. Both shape the eventual physiological burden of warming.
Projected increases reached 43.9% on land
When the researchers combined their global relationships with projected warming under RCP2.6, they forecast metabolic-rate increases of up to 26.6% in aquatic invertebrates and 43.9% in terrestrial invertebrates.
The gap between those upper estimates is 17.3 percentage points. More importantly, the terrestrial maximum is roughly 65% larger than the aquatic maximum when the two percentages are compared proportionally. These figures do not mean that every land invertebrate will experience a 43.9% increase, or that every aquatic species will experience 26.6%. They describe the upper projected changes emerging from a model that incorporates geographic and ecosystem differences.
The projections identify terrestrial species and higher-latitude invertebrates as groups deserving particular attention. Because invertebrates underpin many ecological processes, widespread shifts in their energy budgets could influence predator-prey relationships, decomposition rates, herbivory and the timing of biological activity.
What the findings change about climate-risk thinking
Climate impact assessments frequently focus on whether species ranges move, populations decline or organisms cross critical temperature thresholds. Metabolic change can occur before those more visible outcomes. It may therefore provide an earlier physiological signal of ecological pressure.
The study also argues against applying a single universal temperature-response rule to invertebrates. Habitat and latitude materially changed the pattern. A terrestrial arthropod at high latitude may face a different metabolic response to warming from an aquatic invertebrate exposed to a similar increase in average temperature.
For ecological modelling, this suggests that incorporating ecosystem-specific thermal sensitivity and plasticity could improve forecasts of climate effects. For conservation, it suggests that physiological monitoring may help identify populations facing increasing energetic strain before abundance changes become obvious.
Important limits to the projections
Meta-analyses inherit the strengths and weaknesses of the studies available to them. Existing metabolic research is not distributed evenly across every species, region or habitat, so a global synthesis can still contain taxonomic and geographic gaps. Invertebrates are extraordinarily diverse, and broad ecosystem averages cannot capture every species-specific response.
Metabolic rate is also only one component of climate vulnerability. The projections do not directly estimate population decline, extinction probability or ecosystem collapse. Real organisms experience temperature together with drought, altered precipitation, oxygen limitation, food-web change, habitat loss, pollution and extreme events.
The RCP2.6 exercise is a modelled projection rather than an observation of future animals. Its value lies in translating measured physiological relationships into a plausible climate context, not in predicting an exact metabolic percentage for every species at a particular future date.
There is also a difference between an increase in metabolism and biological damage. A metabolic increase becomes consequential through its interaction with resource availability, thermal limits, behaviour, life history and the organism’s ability to acclimate. Those mechanisms will require more species-level and field-based work.
A physiological map of uneven warming risk
The main contribution of the study is not simply that warming speeds up ectotherm metabolism. That principle is well established. The advance is showing, across a global synthesis, that the strength of the response is uneven and systematically associated with ecosystem type, latitude and climatic history.
Aquatic invertebrates generally showed weaker thermal sensitivity than terrestrial ones. Sensitivity increased toward higher latitudes, particularly on land. Organisms from warm and stable climates showed greater metabolic plasticity, while colder and more variable environments were associated with stronger thermal sensitivity. When these relationships were projected into a modest warming scenario, the estimated metabolic increases reached 26.6% in aquatic systems and 43.9% in terrestrial systems.
That combination provides a more detailed picture of climate exposure. Warming is not simply an external temperature change. For many organisms, it changes the internal rate at which life has to run.
Source Information
Study: Global meta-analysis of metabolic responses to climate change in aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates
Authors: Milad Shokri, Anton M. Potapov, Francesco De Leo, Félix P. Leiva, Alexei V. Uvarov and Alberto Basset
Journal: Nature Communications
Published: 25 September 2026
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-77865-7
Article type: Peer-reviewed, open-access research article
