BIBLIOS

Document type
Journal articles

Document subtype
Full paper

Title
Heat-induced female biased sex ratio during development is not mitigated after prolonged thermal selection

Participants in the publication
Marta A. Santos (Author)
Centro de Ecologia, Evolução e Alterações Ambientais
Marta A. Antunes (Author)
cE3c
Afonso Grandela (Author)
Dep. Biologia Animal
cE3c
Ana Carromeu-Santos (Author)
Ana S. Quina (Author)
Mauro Santos (Author)
Margarida Matos (Author)
Centro de Ecologia, Evolução e Alterações Ambientais
Dep. Biologia Animal
Pedro Simões (Author)
Dep. Biologia Animal
cE3c

Summary
Background\\\\nThe negative impacts of climate change on biodiversity are consistently increasing. Developmental stages are particularly sensitive in many ectotherms. Moreover, sex-specific differences in how organisms cope with thermal stress can produce biased sex ratios upon emergence, with potentially major impacts on population persistence. This is an issue that needs investigation, particularly testing whether thermal selection can alleviate sex ratio distortions in the long-term is a critical but neglected issue. Here, we report an experiment analyzing the sex ratio patterns at different developmental temperatures in Drosophila subobscura populations subjected to long-term experimental evolution (~ 30 generations) under a warming environment.\\\\n\\\\nResults\\\\nWe show that exposure to high developmental temperatures consistently promotes sex ratio imbalance upon emergence, with a higher number of female than male offspring. Furthermore, we found that thermal selection resulting from evolution in a warming environment did not alleviate such sex ratio distortions generated by heat stress.\\\\n\\\\nConclusions\\\\nWe demonstrate that heat stress during development can lead to clear sex ratio deviations upon emergence likely because of differential survival between sexes. In face of these findings, it is likely that sex ratio deviations of this sort occur in natural populations when facing environmental perturbation. The inability of many insects to avoid thermal shifts during their (more) sessile developmental stages makes this finding particularly troublesome for population subsistence in face of climate warming events.


Institution
FACULDADE DE CIÊNCIAS DA UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA

Where published
BMC Ecology and Evolution

Publication Identifiers
ISSN - 2730-7182

Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC


Document Identifiers
DOI - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-023-02172-4
URL - http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12862-023-02172-4

Rankings
Web Of Science Q3 (2022) - 2.2 - Evolutionary Biology
SCIMAGO Q1 (2022) - 0.968 - Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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