Greater heat stress and habitat loss concertedly increases extinction risk of organisms living in the fragmented urban habitats; while evolutionary response by the threatened organisms give chance to survive these recent and rapid environmental changes. Therefore, it is important to reveal factors responsible for dividing the fate of threatened organisms, either extinction or survival, in fragmented habitats within urban heat island.

We selected a katydid, Mecopoda nipponensis, as study species to examine impact of urban heat island on local extinction or population persistence due to rapid adaptive evolution to heat stress. Study area is located in urban and rural area east of Tokyo metropolis, one of biggest city of the world.

Species distribution modeling detected that higher night time temperature and shorter forest edge length were major environmental factors that limit the local distribution. However, laboratory experiments conducted to detect if rapid evolutionary gain of heat tolerance enable local M. nipponens population to survive in urban heat island using katydids collected in urban and rural sites allowed to sing in five temperature regime (from 19 to 31 C with 2C interval) did not show any signature of rapid evolution.