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Data from: Inter-sexual phenotypic divergence is correlated with habitat structure in an invasive lizard

Morooka, Maki1; Quitián, Marta12; Cronin, Adam1

Published May 09, 2025 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.51c59zwkj

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May 09, 2025 version files 1.71 MB

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Abstract

Organisms faced with environmental change must adapt or go extinct. Adaptive change can arise through adaptive evolution, phenotypic plasticity, and the potentially complex interaction between these factors. In dioecious species, this may be further complicated by differences in the strength and direction of adaptive responses in males and females. Adaptation can be constrained by differences in the direction of selection between the sexes, though sexual dimorphism in adaptive evolution and/or phenotypic plasticity can also potentially facilitate adaptation to environmental change through reducing intraspecific competition and enhancing population persistence. In invasive species, the constraints imposed by inter-specific competition on intra-specific niche divergence may be shed by ecological release. In such conditions, we can expect high potential for inter-sexual divergence in adaptive change, possibly augmenting invasiveness. In this study, we investigate the potential for sexually divergent adaptive change in invasive populations of the Green Anole, Anolis carolinensis, in the Ogasawara Islands, an oceanic archipelago in Japan. We find that limb length is correlated with variation in habitat structure across the islands in male lizards, but not in female lizards. We suggest that the resulting variation in sexual dimorphism is driven by exploitation of the available niche space, with male habitat use diverging further from that of females where local conditions allow. These findings represent evidence that community-level patterns observed among other anole species are mirrored by local, intra-specific patterns in this population, and add to growing evidence of the importance of ecological drivers of sexual dimorphism.