Lizard Evolutionary Ecology in Islands
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Herpetology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2023) | Viewed by 34357
Special Issue Editors
Interests: physiological and ecological adaptations of reptiles and land snail in Mediterranean-type ecosystems; study of life history traits; comparative biology; thermal biology; predation; antipredatory mechanisms; insularity; conservation of endemic species; phylogeny of reptiles; comparative morphometrics
Interests: physiological and ecological adaptations of reptiles in Mediterranean type ecosystems; thermal biology; host-parasite interactions; prey-predator interactions; insularity; phenotypic plasticity; epigenetics; phylogeny and evolution of reptiles
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Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
It has been almost 50 years since the publication of the first edition of the now-classic book "Evolutionary Ecology" by Eric Pianka, which created the basis for how questions on animal ecology should be approached. In these fifty years, thousands of papers have been published, addressing questions on species biotic and abiotic interactions and the importance of phenotypic variation upon which natural selection can act. In all of this work, lizards, due to their biological and biogeographical properties, have been important model organisms to address many of these questions related to ecology, including topics such as population dynamics, urbanization, reproductive strategies, prey–predator and host–parasite interactions, thermoregulation, behavioral ecology and evolution, etc. On top of that, in all of these studies, insular populations provided many answers, but at the same time they posed new ones on how animals behave, function or adjust to the particular environment prevailing on the islands—"laboratories" of natural selection.
In this Special Issue, we aspire to present new trends and approaches to studying the continuous interactions between lizards that may serve as model organisms and key stone species on many environments and the special biotic and abiotic characteristics of islands. As pointed out by G. A. Bartholomew in 1958, each organism is inseparable from its environment and is essentially a complex system of interactions between a self-assembling physico-chemical system and its environment.
Prof. Dr. Efstratios D. Valakos
Dr. Kostas Sagonas
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- evolutionary ecology
- lizards
- islands
- adaptation
- parasitism
- predation
- thermal biology
- plasticity
- population dynamics
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