Meeting Abstract
Human-mediated environmental change is having profound impacts on ecosystems across the globe. For example, urbanization creates local environments that are hotter than surrounding natural areas (urban heat island effect). Urban warming likely has widespread biological consequences, affecting temporal patterns of growth, survival and reproduction. Therefore, urban heat islands may provide a unique opportunity to explore how organisms respond to anthropogenic change. However, our understanding of biological response to these extreme environments is limited. In this study, we explore in situ divergence in thermal tolerance and gene expression between urban and natural populations of the crested anole across the island of Puerto Rico. We use common garden experiments to examine the contributions of adult flexibility, developmental plasticity and constitutive genetically-based differences to observed performance and regulatory divergence observed in situ. Lastly, we use transcriptome scans to search for evidence of temperature-induced selection in urban heat islands. Together, these data provide a comprehensive investigation of the biological effects of urban heat islands on thermal physiology of ectothermic species.
