Loss of largest and oldest individuals of the Montpellier snake correlates with recent warming in the southeastern Iberian Peninsula  

作　　者：Cosme LOPEZ-CALDERON Monica FERICHE Esmeralda ALAMINOS Juan M. PLEGUEZUELOS 

机构地区：[1]Department of Zoology, Faculty of Biology, University of Seville, C/Reina Mercedes, Seville, E-41012, Spain [2]Department of Zoology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Granada, Granada, E-18071, Spain

出　　处：《Current Zoology》2017年第6期607-613,共7页动物学报（英文版）

摘　　要：The effects of climate change on organisms are now being extensively studied in many different taxa. However, the variation in body size, usually shrinkage in response to increasing temperature, has received little attention regarding to reptiles. During past periods of global warming, many organisms shrank in size, and current evidence and experiments manipulating temperature have shown a biomass decrease in some organisms with increasing temperatures. Here we test whether the body size of the Montpellier snake Malpolon rnonspessulanus from the southeastern Iberian Peninsula is changing and correlated with the increasing temperature in this region during a 39- year period （1976-2014）. We measured the snout-vent length （SVL） of vouchers in scientific collections to check for trends in adult body size at the population level in relation with temperature, while controlling for the age of the individuals （estimated by skeletochronology, n =141）. Given the great ontogenetic variation in body size of the study species, we categorized age in 3 classes： ＂young adults＂ （under 5 years old）, ＂intermediate adults＂ （from 5 to 7 years old）, and ＂old adults＂ （from 8 to 14 years old）. By means of linear mixed models, we found a negative relationship between SVL of ＂old adults＂ and average annual temperature in the region during the lifetime of each individual. Our results indicate that largest and oldest individuals of the Montpellier Snake, that is, males because of strong sexual size dimorphism in this species, disappeared from the study population, and suggest that it occurred in response to rising environmental temperature.

关 键 词：body shrinkage climate warming differential mortality Malpolon monspessulanus SKELETOCHRONOLOGY snakes Spain. 

分 类 号：Q1[生物学—普通生物学]