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Prepared by Olivia Torresan
With enough time, species can evolve to adapt to a different environment or climate. Sometimes (though, not always) this can be expressed in a detectable physical change: the shape and size of a leaf, a limb, or even the colour of scales, feathers, or fur. These changes add up, and over time these adaptations in a population can even demarcate into a new species.
To make sense of the potential drivers of physical changes and species splits, researchers use knowledge of the historic environment to compare with changes in physical traits. In this paper, Green et al. use climate data from the Atlas of Living Australia’s Spatial Portal alongside delineated environmental regions to explain the changes in gecko tail shape across Australia.
They find that wider, flatter tails predominantly occur in the Australian Monsoonal Tropics (regions with extreme wet and dry seasons), whereas narrower, tapered tails occur in more arid regions. They suggest the ‘bulbous’ morphology of the wider-tailed geckos could reflect an adaptation to harness energy stores during periods of high resource availability (wet seasons) in order to prepare for potential scarcity in dry seasons (analogous to how succulents’ function in the plant world)!
