Ecol. Lett. http://doi.org/7hg (2015)
Shifting their geographical range is one of the main mechanisms by which species can, and in many cases already are, adapting to climate change. Range shifts are controlled by thermal preferences, among other factors, but these are not necessarily uniform across individuals within a particular species.
Elvire Bestion, from the Station d'Ecologie Expérimentale de Moulis, CNRS, France, and co-workers studied the dispersal of individual common lizards (Zootoca vivipara) in response to climate warming using a semi-natural warming experiment to investigate the potential for intraspecific variation in dispersal.
They find that individuals with preferences for low temperatures dispersed more from warmer habitats than those preferring relatively high temperatures. The authors hypothesize that this selective dispersal process may result in the segregation of thermal phenotypes along dispersal routes. They go on to argue that this could facilitate local adaptation to climate warming and that range shift models would be improved by including intraspecific variation in thermal phenotype and dispersal.
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Brown, A. Intraspecific dispersal. Nature Clim Change 5, 912 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2817
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2817
