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Abstract
Hypoxia and low temperature at high altitudes are the main environmental pressures for alpine animals, inducing phenotypic plasticity at several levels. To investigate the effect of these variables on the organ mass of Phrynocephalus vlangalii, 138 individuals belonging to four populations living along an altitudinal gradient in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (China) were dissected to remove heart, lungs, stomach, and intestinal tract. Organ dry mass, individuals’ sex, and body mass, as well as mean annual temperature and average air pressure (calculated from a 30-year-data series obtained from the National Climatic Data Center) were subjected to two-way analyses of covariance and generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs). Except for the heart, organ mass varied significantly among populations, although only lung and stomach mass increased significantly with increasing altitude. Males’ heart and lung mass was higher than that of females, which might be due to their different behavior and reproductive efforts. GLMM analyses indicated that air pressure had a positive effect on heart, lung and intestinal tract mass, whereas temperature had a negative effect on these three organs. In order to explain the effect of hypoxia and low temperature on P. vlangalii’s organ mass, further rigorous study on respiration, energy budget and food intake was encouraged.
Highlights
Phenotypic plasticity, the ability of a genotype to produce different phenotypes across environmental conditions, is a tactic enabling organisms to adapt to heterogeneous environments [1,2]
Many of the known biological responses to hypoxia were not derived from studies based on plateau native species, and the phenotypic plasticity induced by hypoxia exposure referred therein might be the result of maladaptation
With the exception of heart mass, organ mass changed with increasing altitude, only lung and intestinal track mass increased significantly with increasing altitude
Summary
Phenotypic plasticity, the ability of a genotype to produce different phenotypes across environmental conditions, is a tactic enabling organisms to adapt to heterogeneous environments [1,2]. This plasticity might be induced by short-term acclimatization or long-term evolutionary adaptation, involving phenotypic components such as morphology and physiology [3,4,5,6]. Many of the known biological responses to hypoxia were not derived from studies based on plateau native species, and the phenotypic plasticity induced by hypoxia exposure referred therein might be the result of maladaptation (reviewed in [5]). Organ mass variation with altitude increase remains largely unknown
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