No evidence that warmer temperatures are associated with selection for smaller body sizes.

ABSTRACT: Reductions in animal body size over recent decades are often interpreted as an adaptive evolutionary response to climate warming. However, for reductions in size to reflect adaptive evolution, directional selection on body size within populations must have become negative, or where already negative, to have become more so, as temperatures increased. To test this hypothesis, we performed traditional and phylogenetic meta-analyses of the association between annual estimates of directional selection on body size from wild populations and annual mean temperatures from 39 longitudinal studies. We found no evidence that warmer environments were associated with selection for smaller size. Instead, selection consistently favoured larger individuals, and was invariant to temperature. These patterns

SUBMITTER: Siepielski AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6661357 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature