Publications by authors named "Julian D Avery"
Population genomics applied to game species conservation can help delineate management units, ensure appropriate harvest levels and identify populations needing genetic rescue to safeguard their adaptive potential. The ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus) is rapidly declining in much of the eastern USA due to a combination of forest maturation and habitat fragmentation. More recently, mortality from West Nile Virus may have affected connectivity of local populations; however, genetic approaches have never explicitly investigated this issue.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFColorful traits (i.e., ornaments) that signal quality have well-established relationships with individual condition and physiology.
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- The study investigates how sex differences in coloration in eastern fence lizards are influenced by hormonal and physiological factors, revealing that males have more vibrant color badges due to testosterone while females exhibit a less costly version of this trait.
- It finds that color saturation in males is linked to better body condition and immune function, whereas female coloration does not show the same relationship, suggesting different resource allocation strategies between the sexes.
- The research suggests that the regulation of these color traits by nonsex hormones might contribute to ongoing sexual conflict over resource investment in ornamentation, as females experience reproductive costs associated with their color features.
Article Synopsis
- Conspicuous coloration in animals, like the eastern fence lizard's color changes with temperature, affects social communication and can complicate the quantification of visual signals in social selection.
- Research aimed to find consistent metrics for quantifying color that either ignore temperature influences or maintain rank orders among individuals across varying temperatures.
- The study showed that individual color saturation increases differently with temperature changes, and relative color ranks in populations fluctuate depending on the chosen measurement metric, highlighting the complexity of assessing animal coloration.
Species with cryptic origins (i.e. those that cannot be reliably classed as native or non-native) present a particular challenge to our understanding of the generation and maintenance of biodiversity.
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