Constitutive Differences in Immune Gene Expression Are Correlated With Wood Frog Populations From Contrasting Winter Environments.

ABSTRACT: Many terrestrial ectotherms have gone to great evolutionary lengths to adapt to long cold winters; some have even evolved the ability to tolerate the freezing of most of the extracellular fluid in the body. Now, however, high-elevation and high-latitude winters are experiencing an accelerated period of warming. Specialised winter adaptations that promoted fitness in a seasonally frozen environment may soon be superfluous or even maladaptive. We ask whether winter adaptations include changes in immune functions, and whether changing winter conditions could exert disparate effects on populations of a wide-ranging terrestrial ectotherm, the wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus). By rearing wood frogs from ancestral winter environments that vary in length and temperature in a common garden, and re

SUBMITTER: Vaziri GJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12143364 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature