Increasing body size and fecundity in a salamander over four decades, possibly due to global warming

Abstract

AbstractRecent climate change has been shown to affect phenotypic traits, such as body size and fecundity, in some animals. It is important to assess the response of a species to climate change for predicting a population’s future. We compared historic and contemporary body size and clutch size measurements in the lentic breeding salamander, Hynobius tokyoensis, collected from a wide range of latitudes in its geographical range and concluded that the species has gone through significant increases in body size and clutch size over the last four decades. Although a decrease in body size due to climate change is well documented for other species, reports of an increase in body size are rare. In addition, we found that increases in temperature and precipitation were constant regardless of latitude, but that the ratios of increase in body size and clutch size were greater in high-latitude populations. Our results suggest that, even within a species, the magnitude of the response to climate change depends on the geography of the population.