Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Sep;35(9):1229-1239.
doi: 10.1111/jeb.14066. Epub 2022 Jul 21.

Genetic and environmental drivers of colour and pattern in the Australian jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus)

Rebecca S Raynal  1 , Lisa E Schwanz  1 , Julia L Riley  1   2 , Kate D L Umbers  3   4
Affiliations

Genetic and environmental drivers of colour and pattern in the Australian jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus)

Rebecca S Raynal et al. J Evol Biol. 2022 Sep.

Abstract

The underlying drivers of variation in the colouration (colour and pattern) of animals can be genetic, non-genetic, or more likely, a combination of both. Understanding the role of heritable genetic elements, as well as non-genetic factors such as age, habitat or temperature, in shaping colouration can provide insight into the evolution and function of these traits, as well as the speed of response to changing environments. This project examined the genetic and non-genetic drivers of continuous variation in colouration in a lizard, the jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus). We leveraged a large captive experiment that manipulated parental and offspring thermal environment to simultaneously estimate the genetic and non-genetic drivers of variation in colouration. We found that the overall brightness, the elongation of the longitudinal stripes on the dorsum and the contrast between light and dark patches of the pattern were all heritable. Colouration varied according to the age of the hatchling; however, the thermal environment of neither the parents nor offspring contributed significantly to colouration. It appears that developmental plasticity and maternal effects associated with temperature are not important drivers of variation in our measures of colouration.

Keywords: animal model; camouflage; elongation; lizard; maternal effects; phenotype; quantitative genetics; squamate reptile; thermoregulation.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
(a) Whole animal photograph focused on its dorsum. The red colouration on the tail was used to temporarily mark lizards for the long‐term study and does not reflect their natural colouration. (b) The corresponding swatch we sampled to quantify their colouration. (c) The artificial colourized representation of how pixels were categorized into colour classes (in this case k = 3).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Variation of colouration in jacky dragons that we observed in this study reflected in our three response variables: overall brightness (top), elongation (middle) and contrast (bottom). For each response variable, we present the histogram of values we observed, as well as representative swatches of jacky dragons from the bottom and top range of values of each variable within the study.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Heritability estimates (h 2) of colouration metrics: brightness, elongation and contrast depicted with associated 95% credible intervals.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Bakken, G. S. , & Gates, D. M. (1975). Heat‐transfer analysis of animals: Some implications for field ecology, physiology, and evolution. In Gates D. M. & Schmerl R. B. (Eds.), Perspectives of biophysical ecology (pp. 255–290). Springer.
    1. Bérénos, C. , Ellis, P. A. , Pilkington, J. G. , & Pemberton, J. M. (2014). Estimating quantitative genetic parameters in wild populations: A comparison of pedigree and genomic approaches. Molecular Ecology, 23, 3434–3451. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Biard, C. , Surai, P. , & Møller, A. (2007). An analysis of pre‐and post‐hatching maternal effects mediated by carotenoids in the blue tit. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 20, 326–339. - PubMed
    1. Booth, C. L. (1990). Evolutionary significance of ontogenetic colour change in animals. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 40, 125–163.
    1. Cadena, V. , Smith, K. R. , Endler, J. A. , & Stuart‐Fox, D. (2017). Geographic divergence and colour change in response to visual backgrounds and illumination intensity in bearded dragons. Journal of Experimental Biology, 220, 1048–1055. - PubMed

Publication types