Evolutionary Biology最新文献

Animal personality refers to consistent individual differences across contexts, ecological situations, and/or time. To understand the evolution of animal personality, it is crucial that macroevolutionary patterns be integrated with intraspecific promoters of individual behavioural consistency. In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis to assess the association between animal personality and different indicators of sociability (a personality evolution driver) in a phylogenetic context. In lizards, higher sociability levels have been associated with the presence of secretory glands and viviparity. We analysed behavioural repeatability data from 62 studies, comprising 486 effect sizes, across 37 species, encompassing five categories (activity, aggressiveness, boldness, exploration, sociability), while accounting for phylogenetic constraints. For each species, we gathered data on the number of secretory glands and the reproductive mode (oviparous or viviparous). Results showed similar values of repeatability for species with and without glands and an absence of correlation between the number of glands and repeatability data. However, viviparous species exhibited higher repeatability compared to oviparous species. When conducting separate analyses for each behavioural type, we observed for boldness that species with glands presented higher repeatability in boldness behaviour. Notably, phylogeny played a variable role in shaping repeatability patterns; specifically, only activity and aggressiveness, and to some extent boldness, were influenced by evolutionary history across species. This study underscores the diverse animal personality patterns existing within a broader comparative macroevolutionary framework. It takes into account life history and morphological traits in Squamate lizards, offering valuable insights into these distinctive dynamics.

Today’s typical application of geometric morphometrics to a quantitative comparison of organismal anatomies begins by standardizing samples of homologously labelled point configurations for location, orientation, and scale, and then renders the ensuing comparisons graphically by thin-plate spline as applied to group averages, principal components, regression predictions, or canonical variates. The scale-standardization step has recently come under criticism as unnecessary and indeed inappropriate, at least for growth studies. This essay argues for a similar rethinking of the centering and rotation, and then the replacement of the thin-plate spline interpolant of the resulting configurations by a different strategy that leaves unexplained residuals at every landmark individually in order to simplify the interpretation of the displayed grid as a whole, the “transformation grid” that has been highlighted as the true underlying topic ever since D’Arcy Thompson’s celebrated exposition of 1917. For analyses of comparisons involving gradients at large geometric scale, this paper argues for replacement of all three of the Procrustes conventions by a version of my two-point registration of 1986 [originally Galton’s of 1907 (Nature 76:617–618, 1907)]. The choice of the two points interacts with another non-Procrustes concern, interpretability of the grid lines of a coordinate system deformed according to a fitted polynomial trend rather than an interpolating thin-plate spline. The paper works two examples using previously published midsagittal cranial data; there result new findings pertinent to the interpretation of both of these classic data sets. A concluding discussion suggests that the current toolkit of geometric morphometrics, centered on Procrustes shape coordinates and thin-plate splines, is too restricted to suit many of the interpretive purposes of evolutionary and developmental biology.