Meeting Abstract
Thermal stress triggered by climate change may negatively affect ecology, reproduction, and life history of many species. Oviparous species may be severely impacted by climate change as their eggs will be laid and incubated at increasingly higher temperatures. The lack of oxygen, or hypoxia, and its role during thermal stress in embryogenesis has been widely debated. In birds and mammals, hypoxia is known to induce craniofacial and neural malformations during development. In lizards, oxygen limitation is thought to set the thermal range of embryonic development. Thermal stress in the early embryonic development of Anolis lizards leads to malformations and even death. In our study, hypoxia did not induce malformations in anole embryos. We compared survival rates and developmental staging of embryos incubated under hypoxic and normoxic embryos in early (day 0–14) and late (day 10–20) development. We discovered survivorship of hypoxic embryos was higher in the early than in the late development, with delayed growth and reduced body sizes in late-stage hypoxic embryos, demonstrating that early reptilian development may be more robust to hypoxia. Additionally, we studied whether cellular-level hypoxia is limiting the thermal response of the developing anole embryo of standard and elevated incubation temperatures in both early and late development. Our preliminary results suggest there are stage-specific effects of hypoxia and thermal stress, as they interact to impede the more sensitive late-stage development of anole embryos. Discovering the effects of hypoxia during thermal stress in early and late reptilian development will help us better understand the potential impacts of climate change on reptiles.
