A week or so ago, students working with Dr. Ben Pierce, including myself, conducted a monthly visual encounter survey at the Twin Springs Preserve in Williamson County, TX. We do these surveys at two sites every month, and we look for a local species near and dear to our hearts: the Georgetown salamander (Eurycea naufragia).
The survey I just mentioned was special in that we had a reporter and photographer from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper take some photos and write an article for this week's paper. I was flattered to be included in the article - as it was primarily focused on opening up this preserve to county-trained, permit-carrying individuals.
Ever caught yourself wondering what it might be like if you could know the sex of your future children? Several methods allow for this to be determined with modest accuracy in the late stages of a human pregnancy, but what about early pregnancy? Before pregnancy? In other animals?
Sometimes the answers to these questions can be predicted based on the context in which they are asked. For example, I came across this article this article a few months ago, and would like to share its findings (full paper here; additional source). Essentially, the researchers found that climate, combined with genetics, was a main determinant of what sex-determining system emerged in a species of lizard.
But isn't sex in vertebrates determined by chromosomes? Not always. For instance, in many (not all) reptiles, sex is influenced by environmental factors, often temperature (i.e., temperature-dependent sex determination, or TSD). But how would a knowledge of TSD help you predict the sex your offspring? Well consider the example offered by our study in question.
In these experiments, an international cohort of herpetologists collected and observed female Spotted Skinks, Niveoscincus ocellatusfrom two types of habitats in Tasmania: highland and lowland. The habitats differ in altitude and therefore atmospheric oxygen, UV irradiation, moisture, and temperature, among others. Female N. ocellatus from the lowland habitat, when raised in a lab setting, varied in the ratios of male/female lizards based on the amount of sunlight they were exposed to (4 hr or 10 hr; sunlight functioning as a natural variable in temperature, UV irradiation, and light). Surprisingly, although the same species, female N. ocellatus from the highland habitat did not demonstrate this discrepency between sunlight exposure times.
What does this mean? The authors of this paper predict that in N. ocellatus, the lowland-dwelling lizards are more likely to give birth to female lizards than male lizards when temperature is higher. Lowland female lizards born earlier (as a result of warm temperatures earlier in the year) have a reproductive advantage over lowland female lizards born earlier in the year. Neither highland lizards or male lowland lizards experience a similar boost from being born earlier (resulting in more females in lowland species in warmer years). For the highland lizards, the overall temperature is colder and there is not a significant reproductive advantage to being born earlier in the year. Additionally, the paper revealed a possible mechanism for species divergence (i.e., cladogenesis) - that of environmentally-sensitive evolution of sex-determination systems.
Remember our question about predicting the sex of future offspring? The authors also suggest that if the warming trend continues in the species' habitat, more females will be expected. Hypothetically, lowland N. ocellatus mothers can plan on more female offspring in their future (assuming it remains an evolutionary stable strategy for the species). Greeting card companies for newborns take note!
Hello again! My last semester was demanding, but I did not forget about this blog of mine. Instead, I have a lineup of several articles, reviews, short writings, and interesting animal behavior finds to be posted in the next couple of months.
Second, I recognize that I am receiving a lot of new traffic to the blog. Welcome visitors! You are welcome to subscribe to the blog using the fancy RSS feed stuff on the right-hand sidebar. I would appreciate that so much. Now on to the good stuff:
Water is crucial to life on Earth, to state the obvious. So crucial, that over 126,000 known species rely on constant access to freshwater habitats to survive. Those lucky enough to stray from the geographic restraints of fresh water habitats often have life cycles that reflect adaptation to the moisture content of their surroundings (e.g., cacti and burrowing toads). Needless to say, the adaptation to recognize water for a terrestrial species will generally be adaptive, whether to find it or to protect against it. In animals, this will often manifest as a behavior, or movement, typical to the species (e.g., cats drinking water).
A bit of hullabaloo occurred last November with the release of a paper in Nature Communications (which I first read about here) with strong evidence for an innate (not learned) recognition of a habitat feature by an animal. More shocking, these animals are mammalian. The paper by Stefan Greif and Björn Siemers found strong evidence in fifteen different species, that bats recognize water as acoustically flat surfaces. Clearly ethology territory. They reached this conclusion by presenting bats with a flat metal sheet, and were surprised to find that bats would attempt to lick the surface of the metal panel, much like how they would drink from a flat body of water.
I could dryly summarize the rest of the paper (an open access article which can be found here), but Nature Communications has already provided a brief, fascinating video with incredible high speed photography that does a better job than I ever could:
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