Insect Hybridization and Climate Change
Publication Date
9-20-2019
Document Type
Article
Organizational Units
Biological Sciences
Keywords
Global change, Biodiversity, Ecosystems, Insect, Hybridization
Abstract
Contemporary global change is altering ecosystems at an unprecedented pace and scale. This critical period is a crisis for biodiversity, but the perturbations caused by global environmental change also offer new opportunities to study the evolution of species boundaries—their persistence, formation, or collapse—over rapid evolutionary timescales. Increasing temperature means and fluctuations have the potential to alter gene flow between species through changes in species distributions, interactions, life history, and temperature-dependent behavior. This is particularly true for insects, whose geographic ranges, behaviors, and life history traits are temperature dependent. Here, we review the potential for climate change to influence gene flow and species boundaries between closely related insect species. We focus on studies that have tracked changes in climate and insect distributions and/or have evaluated temperature dependent reproductive barriers between species.
Publication Statement
Copyright held by author or publisher. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Recommended Citation
Larson, Erica L, et al. “Insect Hybridization and Climate Change.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 7, 2019, pp. Frontiers in ecology and evolution, 2019–09-20, Vol.7. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2019.00348.