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Climate change is well understood to be a major threat to biodiversity, but sublethal impacts of high temperatures, such as reduced fertility, have been poorly studied. We examined a panel of 43 Drosophila species, finding that 19 experience significant fertility loss at temperatures up to 4.3°C cooler than their lethal temperature limits. We found that upper thermal fertility limits explain global distributions of species better than limits based on lethal temperatures. This suggests that limits to reproduction, rather than limits to survival, can underpin species distributions in nature. Given that high temperatures impair male fertility across a broad range of animals and plants, many species may be at increased risk of extinction due to inability to reproduce at high temperatures. One Sentence Summary Species’ distributions and response to climate change are strongly affected by the temperature at which they lose fertility.

PDF file containing all supplementary material- Text S1 "Polyandry and Sperm Competition with an Arbitrary Number of Mating Partners", Text S2 "Analytical Results | Single Release", Text S3 "Analytical Results | Continued Release under Monandry"

Supplementary materials. Included are a supplementary table (Table S1) and two supplementary figures (Figures S1-S2). (DOCX 2196 kb)

Supplementary materials. Included are a supplementary table (Table S1) and two supplementary figures (Figures S1-S2). (DOCX 2196 kb)

The presence of selfish genetic elements can have fatal consequences for populations that harbor them. In the well known t haplotype in wild house mice, large proportions of the population die from t/t recessive lethal effects. Due to strong advantages at the gamete level (drive), t haplotypes nevertheless occur at substantial frequencies. The stable presence of a lethal is not the only effect of the t. It also distorts the fate of mutations that differentially affect male and female survival and reproduction (such as in sexual conflict), by giving male selective effects a strong advantage over female selective effects. In a recent study, we proposed polyandry as a potential counterstrategy against t deleterious effects. Here, we show that (1) the efficiency of polyandry in reducing the t frequency strongly depends on the selective context and (2) polyandry helps to reduce male-biased leverage in sex dependent selection.