Camouflage in arid environments: the case of Sahara-Sahel desert rodents

Title:

Camouflage in arid environments: the case of Sahara-Sahel desert rodents

Creator:

Nokelainen, Ossi, Sreelatha, Lekshmi B., Brito, José Carlos, Campos, João C., Scott-Samuel, Nicholas E., Valkonen, Janne K., and Boratyński, Zbyszek

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:8339e445-bd2b-41b9-9e92-c9d42ec54b48
uuid:8339e445-bd2b-41b9-9e92-c9d42ec54b48
doi:10.25225/jvb.20007

Subject:

Africa, background matching, crypsis, predation, and protective colouration

Type:

model:article and TEXT

Format:

počítač and online zdroj

Description:

Deserts and semi-deserts, such as the Sahara-Sahel region in North Africa, are exposed environments with restricted vegetation coverage. Due to limited physical surface structures, these open areas provide a promising ecosystem to understand selection for crypsis. Here, we review knowledge on camouflage adaptation in the Sahara-Sahel rodent community, which represents one of the best documented cases of phenotype-environment convergence comprising a marked taxonomic diversity. Through their evolutionary history, several rodent species from the Sahara-Sahel have repeatedly evolved an accurate background matching against visually-guided predators. Top-down selection by predators is therefore assumed to drive the evolution of a generalist, or compromise, camouflage strategy in these rodents. Spanning a large biogeographic extent and surviving repeated climatic shifts, the community faces extreme and heterogeneous selective pressures, allowing formulation of testable ecological hypotheses. Consequently, Sahara-Sahel rodents poses an exceptional system to investigate which adaptations facilitate species persistence in a mosaic of habitats undergoing climatic change. Studies of these widely distributed communities permits general conclusions about the processes driving adaptation and can give insights into how diversity evolves.

Language:

English

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
policy:public

Coverage:

1-12

Source:

Journal of Vertebrate Biology | 2020 Volume:69 | Number:2

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false