ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
No evidence that warmer temperatures are associated with selection for smaller body sizes.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Limited evidence that body size shrinking and shape-shifting alleviate thermoregulatory pressures in a warmer world.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Shrinking body size under climate warming is not associated with selection for smaller individuals in a migratory bird.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Review
- Effects of temperature experienced across life stages on morphology and flight behavior of painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui).Movement ecology · 2024Article
- Body size decline during thermal evolution is only detected at mild temperature.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Thermoregulatory consequences of growing up during a heatwave or a cold snap in Japanese quail.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- A long-term study of size variation in Northern GoshawkEcology and evolution · 2023Article
- Human pressures modulate climate-warming-induced changes in size spectra of stream fish communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Abiotic conditions shape spatial and temporal morphological variation in North American birds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Thermal adaptation best explains Bergmann's and Allen's Rules across ecologically diverse shorebirds.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Energetic constraints on body-size niches in a resource-limited marine environment.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Trans- and Within-Generational Developmental Plasticity May Benefit the Prey but Not Its Predator during Heat Waves.Biology · 2022Article
- Article
- Connecting the data landscape of long-term ecological studies: The SPI-Birds data hub.The Journal of animal ecology · 2021Article
- The importance of pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection promoting adaptation to increasing temperatures.Current zoology · 2021Article
- Habitat loss, predation pressure and episodic heat-shocks interact to impact arthropods and photosynthetic functioning of microecosystems.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Natural and human-induced environmental changes and their effects on adaptive potential of wild animal populations.Evolutionary applications · 2020Article
- Recent warming reduces the reproductive advantage of large size and contributes to evolutionary downsizing in nature.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Reductions in animal body size over recent decades are often interpreted as an adaptive evolutionary response to climate warming. However, for reductions in size to reflect adaptive evolution, directional selection on body size within populations must have become negative, or where already negative, to have become more so, as temperatures increased. To test this hypothesis, we performed traditional and phylogenetic meta-analyses of the association between annual estimates of directional selection on body size from wild populations and annual mean temperatures from 39 longitudinal studies. We found no evidence that warmer environments were associated with selection for smaller size. Instead, selection consistently favoured larger individuals, and was invariant to temperature. These patterns were similar in ectotherms and endotherms. An analysis using year rather than temperature revealed similar patterns, suggesting no evidence that selection has changed over time, and also indicating that the lack of association with annual temperature was not an artefact of choosing an erroneous time window for aggregating the temperature data. Although phenotypic trends in size will be driven by a combination of genetic and environmental factors, our results suggest little evidence for a necessary ingredient-negative directional selection-for declines in body size to be considered an adaptive evolutionary response to changing selection pressures.
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