UROL - Lizard Adaptation to Biophysical Environment

• Title: Understanding Rules of Life (URoL) - Integrating Responses to Environmental Change Across the Biological Hierarchy: Interactions Between Behavior, Plasticity, and Genetic Change
• Principal Investigators: Christian Cox
• Funding Amount: $468,517
• Funding Source: National Science Foundation
• Timeline: 12/01/20–11/30/25

Throughout the history of life on earth, organisms have experienced rapid changes in their environments. These can include changes in abiotic or biotic variables that arise from local shifts in climate, the colonization of new habitats, or anthropogenic disturbances (e.g., habitat alteration, pollution, invasive species). Many populations have persisted in the face of ancient climatic fluctuations, and others have experienced environmental change as they disperse and establish on new continents and islands, with successful colonizers often radiating into new branches on the tree of life. In the modern world, human activities are dramatically altering many environments, and it is important to be able to predict the effects of these changes on the viability of populations.

Here, we build on an existing transplant experiment that moved Anolis lizards from a single source population to islands in the Panama Canal that vary in habitat structure and local climate.