*Forum | Why sex matters in phenological research
Why sex matters in phenological research
Takefumi Nakazawa, Yu-Hsun Hsu, I-Chin Chen
As climate change shifts the timing of the seasons, it messes with different organisms in different ways—which can disrupt the way they interact. A predator might emerge before its prey does, for example, creating a trophic mismatch. Males and females of the same species can get out of whack, too, to the potential detriment of the next generation.
These Forum authors confront that idea of “sexual mismatch,” pointing out that males of many species gear up for mating before females do—or vice versa—as each sex responds differently to environmental cues. Their model shows that both sex-specific timing and trophic timing play important roles in the dynamics of a population.
But their literature reviews find that sex-specific information from the real world is scarce. Among other data limitations, studies of breeding cues tended to be male-biased for birds and mammals and female-biased for fish and insects. Notably, males had more variable timing than females for several species where the two sexes look different from each other—contrary to a conventional view that females are more likely to shift their timing.
Speculating that sexually dimorphic species may be especially vulnerable to a changing climate, the authors outline a more sex-conscious research agenda for the future (including collecting sex information during population monitoring, and using eDNA to gauge sex ratios) to better understand the ecological impacts of climate change.
Oikos Forum is a place where ecological ideas can be kicked around and examined from new angles. Forum papers bring together multiple fields, push boundaries, and offer new ways of interpreting existing data. They strive for conceptual unification and serve as a point of departure for future work rather than simply summarizing previous bodies of theory and data. Through the Forum we seek to challenge current thinking on ecological issues and provide a high level of synthesis in the field of ecology. Artwork and summaries by Abby McBride.
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