New Lit Alert: Big cities, big bodies: urbanisation correlates with large body sizes and enhanced body condition in African dwarf chameleons (Genus: Bradypodion)

Big cities, big bodies: urbanisation correlates with large body sizes and enhanced body condition in African dwarf chameleons (Genus: Bradypodion)

Jody M. Barends & Krystal A. Tolley

Abstract

Urbanisation is a major driver of habitat transformation that alters the environmental conditions and selective regimes of the habitats where it occurs. For species inhabiting urban habitats, such alterations can facilitate adaptive responses in their phenotypes, including their morphology. Quantifying potential responses could provide important information for assessing adaptation to urbanisation and may also be relevant to their conservation. Previous studies on African dwarf chameleons (Bradypodion) have shown these lizards to have remarkable adaptive capacity in response to different habitats (e.g. closed canopy habitats vs. open canopy habitats). Several of these species exploit urban habitats, but the extent to which populations are adapting to urban environments has only recently started to receive attention. In this study, we quantify differences in body size and body condition between urban and natural populations of five species of dwarf chameleons. For most comparisons, either females, males or both sexes from urban populations were longer, heavier and/or had better body condition than those from natural populations. In the remaining cases, there were no differences in these traits between populations. Our findings conform with the emerging paradigm that urbanisation positively correlates with enhanced lizard body sizes and condition, although the reasons for this may be complex. Nevertheless, our data provide an avenue for future research into investigating the potential factors (e.g. food supply, predation risk, etc.) that facilitate the trends we observed.

Read the study

Barends, J. M., & Tolley, K. A. (2024). Big cities, big bodies: urbanisation correlates with large body sizes and enhanced body condition in African dwarf chameleons (Genus: Bradypodion). African Zoology, 1-9.

If you’re an author on this paper or just found it really interesting, consider writing a post telling us more about it! Contact Kristin for more details and to become a contributor.

Featured photo: © Justin Ponder, some rights reserved (CC-BY)

• Author
• Recent Posts

Olivia Weklar

Graduate Student at New York University

Olivia is a graduate student in Kristin's lab at NYU. She studies the impacts of urbanization on the diet and gut microbiome of birds!

Latest posts by Olivia Weklar (see all)

• Urban Evolution at SICB 2025 - December 20, 2024
• New Lit Alert: City lights, moonlit nights: examining bat responses to urbanization and lunar cycles - December 9, 2024
• New Lit Alert: Body size and survival of urban and rural populations of a common wolf spider are not influenced by lifelong exposure to lead pollution  - December 4, 2024