Trivial pursuits

Abstract

We demonstrate that the conclusions drawn by Bernhard et al. (2018) regarding the ability of nonlinear averaging to accurately predict organismal performance under fluctuating temperatures are flawed because of a series of experimental and statistical issues that include the presence of a hidden treatment effect, the use of a single low frequency temperature fluctuation that could easily be tracked by the fast growing organism, and the decision to quantify performance via population growth rate, a metric that can mask significant variation in population size.