This phase is followed by the degeneration of the male reproductive system and a period of lability. The highlands are colder with a higher magnitude of annual temperature fluctuation and a shorter activity season, delaying maturity, thus GSD is favored so sex ratios are not skewed.
An Introduction to Behavioral Endocrinology.
Bull, James. Environmental conditions such as humidity or population density can alter sex in some organisms, and a widespread form of non-genetic sex determination is temperature-dependent sex determination.
Unlike the situation in mammals, sex determination in reptiles and birds is hormone-dependent. PLOS One. However, inresearchers discovered that a lizard native to Southeastern Australia, called the Jacky dragon, lives only three to four years and exhibits TSD.
Pieau and his colleagues focused on defining the TSD thermosensitive period, or the time of development during which changes in temperature can alter sexual organ growth. An Introduction to Behavioral Endocrinology. Because most reptile species that exhibit TSD live for more than a decade, researchers struggle to measure the reproductive success of these organisms.
Results indicated that in the second season, during which most lizards became reproductive, males raised at intermediate temperatures had the greatest reproductive success of all the males, while females at extreme temperatures had more offspring than those raised at intermediate temperatures.
Spencer and Janzen found further support for the Charnov-Bull model by incubating painted turtles Chrysemys picta at different temperatures and measuring various characteristics indicative of fitness. Skip navigation. While sex hormones have been observed to be influenced by temperature, thus potentially altering sexual phenotypes, specific genes in the gonadal differentiation pathway display temperature influenced expression.
Although other environmental temperature dependent sex determination in crocodiles band in Kingston upon Hull can have similar effects, temperature is the most wide-spread factor that alters aromatase activity and sex determination.
This discovery made measurement of lifetime reproductive success for a vertebrate species with TSD more feasible.
Recent studies Bergeron et al. In future, we would like to know how an unstable environmental factor such as incubation temperature was able to establish itself as a sex determination factor. One remarkable finding is that the injection of an aromatase inhibitor into the eggs of an all-female parthenogenetic species of lizards causes the formation of males Wibbels and Crews