Abstract
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that wildlife is facing. Rapid shifts in climatic conditions may accelerate evolutionary changes in populations as a result of strong selective pressure. Most studies focus on the impact of climatic conditions on phenologies and annual cycles, whereas there are fewer reports of empirical support for climate-driven changes in the phenotypic variability of free-living populations. We investigated whether climatic variables explain the prevalence of colour polymorphism in a population of the grass snake (Natrix natrix) with two morphotypes, the melanistic and non-melanistic ones, in the period 1981–2013. We found that the prevalence of the black phenotype was negatively related to spring temperature and winter harshness, expressed as the number of snow days. According to the thermal melanism hypothesis, a high predation rate during warmer springs may override relaxed thermal benefits and vice versa, i.e. black individuals may perform better than typical ones when thermal conditions in spring are unfavourable. In turn, because they are smaller, melanistic individuals may be exposed to a higher risk of winter mortality, particularly during longer winters. We highlight the need for more studies on the effects of climatic conditions on temporal variation in melanism prevalence in other populations and species as well as in various geographic regions.
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Dataset on the frequency of melanistic snakes and climatic variables is available in supplementary file.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Peter Senn for proof-reading the text and providing linguistic corrections. We also thank Todd Lewis and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
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The study was financially supported by the Jagiellonian University of Kraków (N18/DBW/000008) and START Programme from the Foundation for Polish Science.
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SB led the writing of the manuscript; TDM helped with writing the manuscript; BN led the collection of the majority field data on snakes; KK helped with writing the manuscript; AK and PCh collected climatic data from the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management. PCh performed the statistical analyses. All the authors gave their final approval to the manuscript.
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Bury, S., Kolanek, A., Chylarecki, P. et al. Climatic conditions and prevalence of melanistic snakes—contrasting effects of warm springs and mild winters. Int J Biometeorol 66, 1329–1338 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02279-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02279-1