A Multilevel Assessment of Plasticity in Response to High-Altitude Environment for Agama Lizards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Upslope range shifting has been documented in diverse species in response to global warming. Plasticity, which refers to the ability of organisms to alter their phenotypes in changing environments, is crucial for the survival of those that newly migrated to a high-altitude environment. The scope and mechanisms of plasticity across biological levels, however, have rarely been examined. We used two agama lizards (genus Phrynocephalus ) as model systems and a transplant experiment to comprehensively assess their plasticity on multiple organization levels. Two low-altitude (934 m) agama species, Phrynocephalus axillaris (oviparous) and P. forsythii (viviparous), were transplanted to a high-altitude site (3,400 m). After acclimation for 6 weeks in seminatural enclosures, plasticity was measured from bite force, tail display behavior, gene expression, and metabolome. Both lizards were capable of acclimating to the high-altitude environment without sacrificing their performance in bite force, but they also showed high plasticity in tail display behavior by either decreasing the intensity of a specific display component ( P. forsythii ) or by the trade-off between display components ( P. axillaris ). Genes and metabolites associated with lipids, especially fatty acid metabolism, exhibited significant differentiation in expression, compared to individuals from their native habitats. Improved fatty acid storage and metabolism appeared to be a common response among animals at high altitudes. Despite distinct reproductive modes that may differ in response to physiological pressure, the two lizards demonstrated high concordance in plasticity when they faced a novel environment at high altitudes. Taken together, lizards likely acclimate to high-altitude environments by reducing behavioral activity and increasing energy efficiency after range shifting. Our results provide new insights into our understanding of phenotypic plasticity and its importance in today’s changing climate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".