Publications by authors named "Matthew E Dickinson"
Article Synopsis
- Rising global temperatures challenge biodiversity, especially affecting reproduction and fertility.
- Research on flour beetles showed that higher temperatures led to males producing shorter sperm and females laying larger eggs, indicating opposing gamete responses.
- Both sperm and eggs produced in warmer conditions improved reproductive success, allowing males to double their success and females to increase offspring production by one-third, highlighting the potential for thermal adaptation in reproduction.
Climate change is affecting biodiversity, but proximate drivers remain poorly understood. Here, we examine how experimental heatwaves impact on reproduction in an insect system. Male sensitivity to heat is recognised in endotherms, but ectotherms have received limited attention, despite comprising most of biodiversity and being more influenced by temperature variation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReproduction through sex carries substantial costs, mainly because only half of sexual adults produce offspring. It has been theorized that these costs could be countered if sex allows sexual selection to clear the universal fitness constraint of mutation load. Under sexual selection, competition between (usually) males and mate choice by (usually) females create important intraspecific filters for reproductive success, so that only a subset of males gains paternity.
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