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Adapting to Global Warming: How Bird and Reptile Embryos Do It

Paper Reviewed
Du, W.-G. and Shine, R. 2015. The behavioural and physiological strategies of bird and reptile embryos in response to unpredictable variation in nest temperature. Biological Reviews 90: 19-30,

In a study published in Biological Reviews, Du and Shine (2015) say that "in oviparous animals (like most reptiles and all birds), an embryo is likely to encounter unpredictable periods when incubation temperatures are unfavorable." And they therefore state that "we might expect natural selection to have favored traits that enable embryos to maintain development despite those fluctuations," after which they proceed to report what they learned about the subject from a search of the scientific literature.

In a very long sentence, the two researchers write that "extreme temperatures (i) can be avoided (e.g. by accelerating hatching, by moving within the egg, by cooling the egg by enhanced rates of evaporation, or by hysteresis in rates of heating versus cooling); (ii) can be tolerated (e.g. by entering diapause, by producing heat-shock proteins, or by changing oxygen use); or (iii) the embryo can adjust its physiology and/or developmental trajectory in ways that reduce the fitness penalties of unfavorable thermal conditions (e.g. by acclimating, by exploiting brief windows of favorable conditions, or by producing the hatchling phenotype best suited to those incubation conditions."

And they thus conclude -- based on what they learned from the 164 scientific papers they cite -- that "like free-living stages of the life cycle, embryos exhibit behavioral and physiological plasticity that enables them to deal with unpredictable abiotic challenges," among which, of course, is global warming.

Posted 18 May 2015