ReviewBiology letters2022
Temperature, size and developmental plasticity in birds.
Review in Biology letters, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- The effect of climate change on avian offspring production: A global meta-analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Pooled it
- Impacts of early-life thermal challenge on development, survival, and physiology in wild great tits.Biology open · 2026Article
- Taxonomic and Trophic Groups Mediate Latitudinal Variation in Saproxylic Beetle Species Richness and Body Size Across Western Palaearctic Oak Forests.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- 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
- Genetic and morphological shifts associated with climate change in a migratory bird.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Exploring microbiome shifts across taxonomic and ecological groups of birds at a key stopover site in Punjab, Pakistan.Current research in microbial sciences · 2025Article
- Long-term increases in wing length occur independently of changes in climate and climate-driven shifts in body size.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- From eggs to adulthood: sustained effects of early developmental temperature and corticosterone exposure on physiology and body size in an Australian lizard.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Variation in the thermal plasticity of avian embryos is produced by the developmental environment, not genes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Endocrine flexibility can facilitate or constrain the ability to cope with global change.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Climate change and its effects on body size and shape: the role of endocrine mechanisms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Shrinking body size may not provide meaningful thermoregulatory benefits in a warmer world.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Recent beak evolution in North American starlings after invasion.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A long-term study of size variation in Northern GoshawkEcology and evolution · 2023Article
- The foraging ecology of yellow-billed and red- billed choughs changed between two climatically different years.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Temperature-dependent Developmental Plasticity and Its Effects on Allen's and Bergmann's Rules in Endotherms.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- Body size predicts the rate of contemporary morphological change in birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Temperature, size and developmental plasticity in birds.Biology letters · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
As temperatures increase, there is growing evidence that species across much of the tree of life are getting smaller. These climate change-driven size reductions are often interpreted as a temporal analogue of the observation that individuals within a species tend to be smaller in the warmer parts of the species' range. For ectotherms, there has been a broad effort to understand the role of developmental plasticity in temperature-size relationships, but in endotherms, this mechanism has received relatively little attention in favour of selection-based explanations. We review the evidence for a role of developmental plasticity in warming-driven size reductions in birds and highlight insulin-like growth factors as a potential mechanism underlying plastic responses to temperature in endotherms. We find that, as with ectotherms, changes in temperature during development can result in shifts in body size in birds, with size reductions associated with warmer temperatures being the most frequent association. This suggests developmental plasticity may be an important, but largely overlooked, mechanism underlying warming-driven size reductions in endotherms. Plasticity and natural selection have very different constraining forces, thus understanding the mechanism linking temperature and body size in endotherms has broad implications for predicting future impacts of climate change on biodiversity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.