Meeting Abstract
Offspring dispersal is an important ecological process with implications for individual fitness. By dispersing, individuals provide a conduit between semi-isolated populations and maintain metapopulation structure, contribute to inbreeding avoidance, and influence population recovery after habitat fragmentation. Previous studies have identified a variety of intrinsic attributes and extrinsic conditions that influence the propensity of individuals to disperse. Because phenotypes related to dispersal can be induced or manifest at various stages of the life-cycle, dispersal itself might be highly variable and depend, to some degree, on the conditions experienced during development. In Sceloporus consobrinus, we examined the influence of incubation conditions on offspring phenotypes and combined this with a mark-recapture study of individual dispersal. We specifically asked whether individual variation in dispersal distance was associated with hatchling size, sex, and incubation conditions.
