Search results for "Rapid environmental change"

Temperature as a modulator of sexual selection

2018

A central question in ecology and evolution is to understand why sexual selection varies so much in strength across taxa; it has long been known that ecological factors are crucial to this. Temperature is a particularly salient abiotic ecological factor that modulates a wide range of physiological, morphological and behavioural traits, impacting individuals and populations at a global taxonomic scale. Furthermore, temperature exhibits substantial temporal variation (e.g. daily, seasonally and inter-seasonally), and hence for most species in the wild sexual selection will regularly unfold in a dynamic thermal environment. Unfortunately, studies have so far almost completely neglected the rol…