Thermal Ecology of C. elegans ^___

Very little is known about the natural environment of the well studied soil nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans. This is a shame, because the vast amount of genetic data can potentially be used to address fundamental questions in evolutionary ecology. One of these questions is the evolution of thermal tolerance and thermal preference in ectotherms. C. elegans provides an ideal model system for this because of its fast generation times and availability of various thermally related mutants.