URBAN ENVIRONMENTS DISTURBS HEAD DEVELOPMENT IN WALL LIZARDS

By comparing the head morphology of urban and rural populations of wall lizards using geometric morphometrics, a Portuguese-Serbian team, which includes CIBIO-InBIO researchers Miguel Carretero and Antogoni Kaliontzopoulou, has found significant deviations in size and shape, which suggest disturbing effects on development. This research extends our understanding of how human activities affect biodiversity and can provide tools for detecting human impacts on ecosystems.

Stay alert for the upcoming paper “Effects of environmental disturbance on phenotypic variation: an integrated assessment of canalization, developmental stability, modularity and allometry in lizard head shape” to be published by the journal The American Naturalist.

Meanwhile, you can take a sneak peak on the important insights it unveils at the American Society of Naturalists’ website.