Integr Comp Biol
November 2024
Ventilation is critical to animal life-it ensures that individuals move air/water across their respiratory surface, and thus it sustains gas exchange with the environment. Many species have evolved highly specialized (if not unusual) ventilatory mechanisms, including the use of behavior to facilitate different aspects of breathing. However, these behavioral traits are often only described anecdotally, and the ecological conditions that elicit them are typically unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFZhao et al. recently reported results which, they claim, suggest that sexual selection produces the multimodal displays seen in little torrent frogs () by co-opting limb movements that originally evolved to support parasite defense (Zhao et al., 2022).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSex steroids play an important role in regulation of the vertebrate reproductive phenotype. This is because sex steroids not only activate sexual behaviors that mediate copulation, courtship, and aggression, but they also help guide the development of neural and muscular systems that underlie these traits. Many biologists have therefore described the effects of sex steroid action on reproductive behavior as both "activational" and "organizational," respectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany animals communicate by performing elaborate displays that are incredibly extravagant and wildly bizarre. So, how do these displays evolve? One idea is that innate sensory biases arbitrarily favour the emergence of certain display traits over others, leading to the design of an unusual display. Here, we study how physiological factors associated with signal production influence this process, a topic that has received almost no attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAbstractUnrelated species often evolve similar phenotypic solutions to the same environmental problem, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. But how do these common traits arise? We address this question from a physiological perspective by assessing how convergence of an elaborate gestural display in frogs (foot-flagging) is linked to changes in the androgenic hormone systems that underlie it. We show that the emergence of this rare display in unrelated anuran taxa is marked by a robust increase in the expression of androgen receptor (AR) messenger RNA in the musculature that actuates leg and foot movements, but we find no evidence of changes in the abundance of AR expression in these frogs' central nervous systems.
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