ORCID Profile
0000-0002-0839-5321
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Publisher: Wiley
Date: 02-05-2021
DOI: 10.1111/BTP.12951
Abstract: Tropical ectotherms are thought to be especially vulnerable to climate change because they are thermal specialists, having evolved in aseasonal thermal environments. However, even within the tropics, habitat structure can influence opportunities for behavioral thermoregulation. Open (and edge) habitats likely promote more effective thermoregulation due to the high spatial heterogeneity of the thermal landscape, while forests are thermally homogenous and may constrain opportunities for behavioral buffering of environmental temperatures. Nevertheless, the ways in which behavior and physiology interact at local scales to influence the response to climate change are rarely investigated. We examined the thermal ecology and physiology of two lizard species that occupy distinct environments in the tropics. The brown anole lizard ( Anolis sagrei ) lives along forest edges in The Bahamas, whereas the Panamanian slender anole ( Anolis apletophallus ) lives under the canopy of mature forests in Panama. We combined detailed estimates of environmental variation, thermoregulatory behavior, and physiology to model the vulnerability of each of these species. Our projections suggest that forest‐dwelling slender anoles will experience severely reduced locomotor performance, activity time, and energy budgets as the climate warms over the coming century. Conversely, the forest‐edge‐dwelling brown anoles may use behavioral compensation in the face of warming, maintaining population viability for many decades. Our results indicate that local habitat variation, through its effects on behavior and physiology, is a major determinant of vulnerability to climate change. When attempting to predict the impacts of climate change on a given population, broad‐scale characteristics such as latitude may have limited predictive power.
Publisher: The Company of Biologists
Date: 2020
DOI: 10.1242/JEB.235697
Abstract: If fitness optima for a given trait differ between males and females in a population, sexual dimorphism may evolve. Sex-biased trait variation may affect patterns of habitat use, and if the microhabitats used by each sex have dissimilar microclimates, this can drive sex-specific selection on thermal physiology. Nevertheless, tests of differences between the sexes in thermal physiology are uncommon, and studies linking these differences to microhabitat use or behavior are even rarer. We examined microhabitat use and thermal physiology in two ectothermic congeners that are ecologically similar but differ in their degree of sexual size dimorphism. Brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) exhibit male-biased sexual size dimorphism and live in thermally heterogeneous habitats, whereas slender anoles (Anolis apletophallus) are sexually monomorphic in body size and live in thermally homogeneous habitats. We hypothesized that differences in habitat use between the sexes would drive sexual ergence in thermal physiology in brown anoles, but not slender anoles, because male and female brown anoles may be exposed to ergent microclimates. We found that male and female brown anoles, but not slender anoles, used perches with different thermal characteristics and were sexually dimorphic in thermal tolerance traits. However, field-active body temperatures and behavior in a laboratory thermal arena did not differ between females and males in either species. Our results suggest that sexual dimorphism in thermal physiology can arise from phenotypic plasticity or sex-specific selection on traits that are linked to thermal tolerance, rather than from direct effects of thermal environments experienced by males and females.
No related grants have been discovered for Inbar Maayan.