Large scale phenotypic characterisation of Hierophis viridiflavus (Squamata: Serpentes): climatic and environmental drivers suggest the role of evolutionary processes in a polymorphic species

Colour variability is largely widespread in the animal world as it is tightly associated with fitness and survivorship. Therefore, the drivers and implications of such variability have been of great interest for zoologists in the past decades. Reptiles are excellent models to investigate colour vari...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Evolutionary ecology 2023-06, Vol.37 (3), p.419-434
Main Authors: Storniolo, Federico, Mangiacotti, Marco, Zuffi, Marco A. L., Scali, Stefano, Sacchi, Roberto
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation
Analysis
Animal Ecology
Automobile drivers
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Climate change
Climate effects
Color
Current distribution
Ecology
Efficiency
Evolutionary Biology
Gene flow
Genomes
Genotype & phenotype
Geographical distribution
Geography
Geological history
Hierophis viridiflavus
Life Sciences
Melanism
Original Paper
Phenotypes
Plant Sciences
Reptiles
Snakes
Survival
Variability
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Summary:Colour variability is largely widespread in the animal world as it is tightly associated with fitness and survivorship. Therefore, the drivers and implications of such variability have been of great interest for zoologists in the past decades. Reptiles are excellent models to investigate colour variations and expression under different conditions. Here, we focused on melanism occurrence in the two main lineages of Hierophis viridiflavus at the scale of the species distribution, by extracting available data from iNaturalist, a citizen science network, with the aim of detecting any pure effect of climate or local habitat on colour expression. Our analyses highlighted that habitat does not explain differences in phenotypes, whereas marked effects of geographic and climatic variables were detected. However, the observed climatic effects could be a proxy of the geographical distribution of the two groups, and thus the high occurrence of bright colourations in western populations of the eastern lineage could be addressed to an ongoing event of asymmetric gene flow in contact zones. The current distribution of phenotypes could be the outcome of the evolutionary history of the species combined with the geological history of the Mediterranean region. This investigation, though, is only preliminary and molecular analyses on highly variable regions of the genome are mandatory to address this issue.
ISSN:0269-7653
1573-8477
DOI:10.1007/s10682-023-10234-8