John Rodgers giving his discuss at SICB 2025
The native nesting setting that anole eggs expertise—temperature, substrate kind, or moisture content material of the soil—might be essential to embryonic growth. Nonetheless, there’s a hole in analysis that mixes these elements and appears at their relative contributions to the variation in offspring phenotypes.
John Rodgers, a Grasp’s pupil in Daniel Warner’s lab at Auburn College, introduced his findings on this subject—which he performed as a part of his undergraduate analysis—at SICB 2025.
John defined how brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) are an incredible organism to check the impact of environmental nesting situations on egg and embryo growth, as they lay one egg at a time and there’s earlier analysis figuring out that temperature and moisture of the setting can have an effect on phenotypes of hatchlings.
For this experiment, eggs have been collected from the wild and positioned amongst eight completely different therapies which various in moisture, temperature, and substrate materials. From these therapies, John measured egg mass over time, time taken for full embryonic growth, hatchling physique dimension (snout-vent size), and mass. John noticed that hotter temperature therapies sped up embryo growth by a median of 10 days, in addition to rising egg progress over time.
John additionally discovered that elevated moisture considerably elevated progress of each the eggs and the hatchlings. Nonetheless, the impacts of each temperature and moisture function primarily in isolation: there doesn’t seem like a transparent interplay between these variables. Moreover, there was no important impression of the substrate kind.
Earlier analysis from the Warner Lab has demonstrated that hatchling mass and price of growth can have health results, which means these findings might assist our understanding of the potential impacts of fixing setting on the survival of anoles. John continues to work with anoles, asking extra questions on habitat use!
Take a look at John’s analysis in additional element right here.
I’m an undergraduate pupil on the Georgia Institute of Know-how, finding out Environmental Science and Biology and at the moment conducting analysis within the Stroud lab.
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