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Climate change has led to a substantial increase in intensity and duration of heat waves worldwide. Predicting the ecological impacts of hot events should incorporate both immediate and potential carry-over effects in different intensities of heat waves. Previous studies suggested that higher heat dose in early life stage of insect generally decreased immediate survival and depressed adult reproduction through carry-over effects, or unchanged adult performance through recovery effects. However, our previous study showed a different pattern, in which longer heat exposures in larval stage did not always decrease but sometimes increase the subsequent adult maturation success in the diamondback moth. We speculated that it might be another important pattern in the carry-over effects vs. heat dose, and conducted experiments using a global pest, Plutella xylostella. Our present results suggested that heat exposures in early life stage reduced the immediate survival and produced general declines with significant zigzag fluctuating patterns in subsequent body size and reproduction as exposure durations increased. The similar patterns were also validated in other insect taxa and other stresses by reanalyzing the experiment data from literatures. The finding highlights the importance for differentiating the biological effects and consequences of changes in heat dose at fine scales; daily exposure hours of a hot day should be considered to predict population dynamic under climate change.

Global climate warming has been exerting impacts on agricultural pests. Pests also take some strategies to adapt to climate change. Understanding such adaptation could benefit more accurate predictions and integrated management of pest. However, adaptation to climate change has not been widely investigated in agricultural pests but has been well documented in model species, Drosophila, and reviewed by Hoffmann before 2003. To provide recent progress and references for agricultural entomologists who interested in thermal biology, here we have reviewed literatures since 2003 about adaptation to temperature changes under climate change. We mainly summarized thermal adaptation of Drosophila (especially to high temperatures) from three aspects, behaviors, plastic responses and micro-evolution and discussed how Drosophila increases their heat tolerance through these three mechanisms. Finally, we summarized the measures of thermotolerance and concluded the main progress in recent decade about the behavioral thermoregulation, mortality risks driven by limited evolutionary and plastic response under climate change, geographic distribution based on basal rather than plastic thermotolerance. We propose future work focus on better understanding adaptation of organisms including agricultural pests to climate change.