Daniel Noble

Australian National University | ANU · Division of Ecology and Evolution

Climate change is altering temperature means and variation, and both need to be considered in predictions underpinning conservation. However, there is no consensus in the literature regarding the effects of temperature fluctuations on biological functions. Fluctuations may affect biological responses because of inequalities from non‐linear response...

Despite the importance of identifying predictable regularities for knowledge transfer across contexts, the generality of ecological and evolutionary findings is yet to be systematically quantified. We present the first large-scale evaluation of generality using new metrics. By focusing on biologically relevant study levels, we show that generalizat...

Meta‐analysis produces a quantitative synthesis of evidence‐based knowledge, shaping not only research trends but also policies and practices in biology. However, two statistical issues, selective reporting and statistical dependence, can severely distort meta‐analytic parameter estimation and inference. Here, we re‐analyse 448 meta‐analyses to dem...

Climate change is expected to result in warmer and more variable thermal environments globally. Greater thermal variability is expected to result in strong selection pressures leading to genetic adaptation and/or the evolution of adaptive phenotypic plasticity. Such responses depend on genetic and phenotypic variability. However, most work has focu...

Critical Thermal Limits (CTLs) gauge the physiological impact of temperature on survival or critical biological function, aiding predictions of species range shifts and climatic resilience. Two recent Drosophila species studies, using similar approaches to determine temperatures that induce sterility (Thermal Fertility Limits; TFLs), reveal that TF...

Climate change is elevating salinity levels in many freshwater systems, and more erratic rainfall is increasing variation in salinity. Consequently, many species now experience more extreme developmental environments. Resultant shifts in developmental trajectories could change key life history traits that persist into adulthood. To date, however, h...

Strong sexual selection frequently favors males that increase their reproductive success by harming females, with potentially negative consequences for natural populations. Understanding what factors modulate conflict between the sexes is hence critical to understand both the evolution of male and female phenotypes and the viability of populations...

Uncovering general rules enhances the predictive capabilities in ecology and evolution. Meta-analytic approaches play a critical role in this endeavour, examining the extent to which phenomena can be replicated, generalized, and transferred. However, ecologists and evolutionary biologists have largely overlooked the role of meta-analytic heterogene...

Selective processes act on phenotypic variation although the evolutionary potential of a trait relies on the underlying heritable variation. Developmental plasticity is an important source of phenotypic variation, but it can also promote changes in genetic variation, yet we have a limited understanding of how they are both impacted. Here, we quanti...

Meta-analysis produces a quantitative synthesis of evidence-based knowledge, shaping not only research trends but also policy and practices in ecology and evolution. However, two statistical issues, selective reporting and statistical dependence, can severally distort meta-analytic evidence. Here, we propose a two-step procedure to tackle these cha...

Extracting data from studies is the norm in meta-analyses, enabling researchers to generate effect sizes when raw data are otherwise not available. While there has been a general push for increased reproducibility in meta-analysis, the transparency and reproducibility of the data extraction phase is still lagging behind. Unfortunately, there is lit...

Live birth is a key innovation that has evolved from egg-laying ancestors over 100 times in reptiles. However, egg-laying lizards and snakes can have preferred body temperatures that are lethal to developing embryos, which should select against prolonged egg retention. Here, we demonstrate that thermal mismatches between mothers and offspring are w...

Vertebrate sex is typically determined genetically, but in many ectotherms sex can be determined by genes (Genetic Sex Determination: GSD), temperature (Temperature-dependent Sex Determination: TSD), or interactions between genes and temperature during development. Temperature dependent sex determination may involve GSD systems with either male or...

Although meta‐analysis has become an essential tool in ecology and evolution, reporting of meta‐analytic results can still be much improved. To aid this, we have introduced the orchard plot, which presents not only overall estimates and their confidence intervals, but also shows corresponding heterogeneity (as prediction intervals) and individual e...

On a global scale, organisms face significant challenges due to climate change and anthropogenic disturbance. In many ectotherms, developmental and physiological processes are sensitive to changes in temperature and resources. Developmental plasticity in thermal physiology may provide adaptive advantages to environmental extremes if early environme...

One of the most pressing questions we face as biologists is to understand how climate change will affect the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations and how these dynamics will in turn affect population recovery. Increasing evidence shows that sexual selection favors population viability and local adaptation. However, sexual selection can also...

The log response ratio, lnRR, is the most frequently used effect size statistic for meta‐analysis in ecology. However, often missing standard deviations (SDs) prevent estimation of the sampling variance of lnRR. We propose new methods to deal with missing SDs via a weighted average coefficient of variation (CV) estimated from studies in the dataset...

The obesity epidemic, largely driven by the accessibility of ultra‐processed high‐energy foods, is one of the most pressing public health challenges of the 21st century. Consequently, there is increasing concern about the impacts of diet‐induced obesity on behavior and cognition. While research on this matter continues, to date, no study has explic...

Selective processes act on phenotypic variation yet the evolutionary potential of any given trait relies on underlying heritable variation. Developmental plasticity is an important source of phenotypic variation, but it can also promote changes in heritability by modifying environmental sources of variability. Here, we quantified the influence of d...

Selective processes act on phenotypic variation yet the evolutionary potential of any given trait relies on underlying heritable variation. Developmental plasticity is an important source of phenotypic variation, but it can also promote changes in heritability by modifying environmental sources of variability. Here, we quantified the influence of d...

Abstract The obesity epidemic is concerning as obesity appears to negatively impact cognition and behavior. Furthermore, some studies suggest that this negative effect could be carried across generations from both mothers and fathers although evidence is not consistent. Here, we attempt to address how obesogenic diets in the parental generation (F0...

Collaborative assessments of direct replicability of empirical studies in the medical and social sciences have exposed alarmingly low rates of replicability, a phenomenon dubbed the ‘replication crisis’. Poor replicability has spurred cultural changes targeted at improving reliability in these disciplines. Given the absence of equivalent replicatio...

Understanding the factors affecting thermal tolerance is crucial for predicting the impact climate change will have on ectotherms. However, the role developmental plasticity plays in allowing populations to cope with thermal extremes is poorly understood. Here, we meta‐analyse how thermal tolerance is initially and persistently impacted by early (e...

One of the most pressing questions we face as biologists is to understand how climate change will affect the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations and how these dynamics will in turn affect population recovery. Increasing evidence shows that sexual selection favours population viability and local adaptation. However, sexual selection can als...

Conspicuously coloured signals may evolve via sexual selection to be ornaments or armaments, thereby conferring a fitness advantage to their bearer. Conversely, conspicuous colours may also evolve under natural selection as either aposematic signals or deimatic displays that deter attacks from predators. While conspicuous colour patches may evolve...

The log response ratio, lnRR, is the most frequently used effect size statistic in ecology. However, missing standard deviations (SDs) are often present in meta-analytic datasets, preventing us from obtaining the sampling variance for lnRR. We propose three new methods to deal with missing SDs. All three methods use the square of the weighted avera...

Conspicuous social and sexual signals are predicted to experience pronounced character release when natural selection via predation is relaxed. However, we have few good examples of this phenomenon in the wild and none in species with dynamic color change. Here, we show that Jackson's chameleons inadvertently introduced from Kenya to Hawaii (Oahu),...

Phenotypic plasticity is an important mechanism that allows populations to adjust to changing environments. Early life experiences can have lasting impacts on how individuals respond to environmental variation later in life (i.e., individual reaction norms), altering the capacity for populations to respond to selection. Here, we incubated lizard em...

Meta-analysis is a powerful tool used to generate quantitatively informed answers to pressing global challenges. By distilling data from broad sets of research designs and study systems into standardised effect sizes, meta-analyses provide physiologists with opportunities to estimate overall effect sizes and understand the drivers of effect variabi...

During the vulnerable stages of early life, most ectothermic animals experience hourly and diel fluctuations in temperature as air temperatures change. While we know a great deal about how different constant temperatures impact the phenotypes of developing ectotherms, we know remarkably little about the impacts of temperature fluctuations on the de...

The obesity epidemic is among the most serious and rapidly growing public health challenges of the 21st century. This rapid increase is concerning as obesity appears to negatively impact cognition and behaviour. Furthermore, some studies suggest that this negative effect could be carried across generations from both mothers and fathers although evi...

The obesity epidemic, largely driven by the accessibility of ultra-processed high-energy foods, is one of the most pressing public health challenges of the 21st century. Consequently, there is increasing concern about the impacts of diet-induced obesity on behaviour and cognition. While research on this matter continues, to date, no study has expli...

The notion that men are more variable than women has become embedded into scientific thinking. For mental traits like personality, greater male variability has been partly attributed to biology, underpinned by claims that there is generally greater variation among males than females in non-human animals due to stronger sexual selection on males. Ho...

There is great diversity in social behavior across the animal kingdom. Understanding the factors responsible for this diversity can help inform theory about how sociality evolves and is maintained. The Australian Tree Skink (Egernia striolata) exhibits inter- and intra-population variability in sociality and is therefore a good system for informing...

Organisms use labile traits to respond to different conditions over short time‐scales. When a population experiences the same conditions, we might expect all individuals to adjust their trait expression to the same, optimal, value, thereby minimising phenotypic variation. Instead, variation abounds. Individuals substantially differ not only from ea...

Recently, Song et al. (2020) conducted a simulation study using different methods to deal with non‐independence resulting from effect sizes originating from the same paper – a common occurrence in ecological meta‐analyses. The main methods that were of interest in their simulations were: 1) a standard random‐effects model used in combination with a...

Publication bias threatens the validity of quantitative evidence from meta‐analyses as it results in some findings being overrepresented in meta‐analytic datasets because they are published more frequently or sooner (e.g. ‘positive’ results). Unfortunately, methods to test for the presence of publication bias, or assess its impact on meta‐analytic...

Increases in phenotypic variation under extreme (e.g. novel or stressful) environmental conditions is emerging as a crucial process through which evolutionary adaptation can occur. Lack of prior stabilising selection, as well as potential instability of developmental processes in these environments, may lead to a release of phenotypic variation tha...

Obesity is a major health condition that affects millions worldwide. There is an increased interest in understanding the adverse outcomes associated with obesogenic diets. A multitude of studies have investigated the transgenerational impacts of maternal and parental obesogenic diets on subsequent generations of offspring, but results have largely...

Obesity is a major health condition that affects millions worldwide. There is an increased interest in understanding the adverse outcomes associated with obesogenic diets. A multitude of studies have investigated the transgenerational impacts of maternal and parental obesogenic diets on subsequent generations of offspring, but results have largely...

Ecological and evolutionary research questions are increasingly requiring the integration of research fields along with larger datasets to address fundamental local and global scale problems. Unfortunately, these agendas are often in conflict with limited funding and a need to balance animal welfare concerns. Planned missing data design (PMDD), whe...

Phenotypic plasticity is an important mechanism that allows populations to adjust to changing environments. Plastic responses induced by early life experiences can have lasting impacts on how individuals respond to environmental variation later in life (i.e., reversible plasticity). Developmental environments can also influence repeatability of pla...

Since the early 1990s, ecologists and evolutionary biologists have aggregated primary research using meta-analytic methods to understand ecological and evolutionary phenomena. Meta-analyses can resolve long-standing disputes, dispel spurious claims, and generate new research questions. At their worst, however, meta-analysis publications are wolves...

While foraging or during social interactions, animals may benefit from judging relative quantity. Individuals may select larger prey or a patch with more food and, likewise, it may pay to track the number and type of individuals and social interactions. We tested for spontaneous quantity discrimination in the gidgee skink (Egernia stokesii), a fami...

1.Publication bias threatens the validity of quantitative evidence from meta-analyses as it results in some findings being overrepresented in meta-analytic datasets because they are published more frequently or sooner (e.g., ‘positive’ results). Unfortunately, methods to test for the presence of publication bias, or assess its impact on meta-analyt...

Physiological processes vary widely across individuals and can influence how individuals respond to environmental change. Repeatability in how metabolic rate changes across temperatures (i.e. metabolic thermal plasticity) can influence mass‐scaling exponents in different thermal environments. Moreover, repeatable plastic responses are necessary for...

Physical exercise not only helps to improve physical health but can also enhance brain development and cognition. Recent reports on parental (both maternal and paternal) effects raise the possibility that parental exercise may provide benefits to offspring through intergenerational inheritance. However, the general magnitude and consistency of pare...

Background Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are increasingly being used to model anxiety. A common behavioral assay employed for assessing anxiety-like behaviors in zebrafish is the “novel tank test”. We hypothesized that using deeper tanks in this test would result in greater between-individual variation in behavioral responses and a more ‘repeatable’ assa...

Diving ectothermic vertebrates are an important component of many aquatic ecosystems, but the threat of climate warming is particularly salient to this group. Dive durations typically decrease as water temperatures rise; yet, we lack an understanding of whether this trend is apparent in all diving ectotherms and how this group will fare under clima...

Live birth is a key innovation that has evolved from egg laying over 100 times in reptiles. One significant feature in this transition is the thermal conditions experienced by developing embryos. Adult lizards and snakes often have preferred body temperatures that can be lethal to developing embryos and should prevent egg retention: how has vivipar...

We tested learning and behavioral flexibility in family-living gidgee skinks (Egernia stokesii) using a multistage visual discrimination task that included acquisition and reversal stages using simple and compound stimuli composed of black shapes superimposed on a colored background. We evaluated how lizards learn compound cues through a probe test...

Strong sexual selection frequently favours males that increase their reproductive success by harming females, with potentially negative consequences for the growth of populations. Understanding what factors may resolve this reproductive “tragedy of the commons” is a key question in evolutionary biology. Studies addressing the evolution of sexual co...

Biologists have long appreciated the critical role energy turnover plays in understanding variation in performance and fitness among individuals. Whole-organism metabolic studies have provided key insights into fundamental ecological and evolutionary processes. However, constraints operating at subcellular levels—such as those operating within the...

Sexual selection shapes the adaptive landscape in complex ways that lead to trait integration. Much of our understanding of selection comes from studies of morphological traits. However, few studies attempt to quantify the form and direction of selection on performance even though it is predicted to be a more direct target of selection in nature. W...

Background: Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are increasingly being used to model anxiety. A common behavioral assay employed for assessing anxiety-like behaviors in zebrafish is the “novel tank test”. We hypothesized that using ‘deeper’ tanks (truly ‘novel’) would result in greater between-individual variation in behavioral responses, and result in a more...

Biomedical and clinical sciences are experiencing a renewed interest in the fact that males and females differ in many anatomic, physiological, and behavioral traits. Sex differences in trait variability, however, are yet to receive similar recognition. In medical science, mammalian females are assumed to have higher trait variability due to estrou...

Recently, there has been a surge in cognition research using non-avian reptile systems. As a diverse group of animals, non-avian reptiles [turtles, the tuatara, crocodylians, and squamates (lizards, snakes and amphisbaenids)] are good model systems for answering questions related to cognitive ecology, from the role of the environment on the brain,...

Two decades ago, von Schantz et al . (von Schantz T, Bensch S, Grahn M, Hasselquist D, Wittzell H. 1999 Good genes, oxidative stress and condition-dependent sexual signals. Proc. R. Soc. B 266, 1–12. ( doi:10.1098/rspb.1999.0597 )) united oxidative stress (OS) biology with sexual selection and life-history theory. This set the scene for analysis of...

A recent meta‐analysis concluded, ‘transgenerational effects are widespread, strong and persistent’. We identify biases in the literature search, data and analyses, questioning that conclusion. Re‐analyses indicate few studies actually tested transgenerational effects – making it challenging to disentangle condition‐transfer from anticipatory paren...

1. Many animal species show individual differences in behaviour that are partially consistent across repeated measurements. Commonly referred to as personality traits, differences in average behaviours are often correlated across individuals, forming ‘behavioural syndromes’ (e.g. individuals who are more aggressive are also bolder).2. Generally, di...

A central question in ecology and evolution is to understand why sexual selection varies so much in strength across taxa; it has long been known that ecological factors are crucial to this. Temperature is a particularly salient abiotic ecological factor that modulates a wide range of physiological, morphological and behavioural traits, impacting in...

Phenotypic responses to a novel or extreme environment are initially plastic, only later to be followed by genetic change. Whether or not environmentally induced phenotypes are sufficiently recurrent and fit to leave a signature in adaptive evolution is debated. Here, we analyze multivariate data from 34 plant reciprocal transplant studies to test:...

Biomedical and clinical sciences are experiencing a renewed interest in the fact that males and females differ in many anatomic, physiological, and behavioral traits. Sex differences in trait variability, however, are yet to receive similar recognition. In medical science, mammalian females are assumed to have higher trait variability due to estrus...

“Classic” forest plots show the effect sizes from individual studies and the aggregate effect from a meta‐analysis. However, in ecology and evolution meta‐analyses routinely contain over 100 effect sizes, making the classic forest plot of limited use. We surveyed 102 meta‐analyses in ecology and evolution, finding that only 11% use the classic fore...

‘Classical’ forest plots show the effect sizes from individual studies and the aggregate effect from a meta-analysis. However, in ecology and evolution meta-analyses routinely contain over 100 effect sizes, making the classical forest plot of limited use. We surveyed 102 meta-analyses in ecology and evolution, finding that only 11% use the classica...

Recently, there has been a surge in cognition research in non-avian reptiles. As a diverse group of animals, non-avian reptiles (turtles, the tuatara, crocodilians, and squamates - lizards, snakes and amphisbaenids) have shown to be good model systems for answering questions related to cognitive ecology; from the role of the environment in brain, b...

1.Physiological processes of individuals can be highly variable and there is mounting evidence that individuals can differ in how they respond to environmental change. The ability for individuals to reversibly adjust their metabolic rate in response to temperature (i.e., metabolic thermal plasticity) may affect mass-scaling at the population level....

Keywords: age difference altricialeprecocial cognition ID/ED attentional set shifting squamates In altricial species, young rely on parental care and brain maturation mainly occurs after birth. In pre-cocial species, young are born at a more advanced developmental stage in need of less or no parental care and brain development is mostly completed a...

Environmentally induced phenotypes have been proposed to initiate and bias adaptive evolutionary change toward particular directions. The potential for this to happen depends in part on how well plastic responses are aligned with the additive genetic variance and covariance in traits. Using meta-analysis, we demonstrate that plastic responses to no...

Response inhibition (inhibiting prepotent responses) is needed for reaching a more favourable goal in situations where reacting automatically would be detrimental. Inhibiting prepotent responses to resist the temptation of a stimulus in certain situations, such as a novel food item, can directly affect an animal’s survival. In humans and dogs, resp...

A central question in ecology and evolution is to understand why sexual selection varies so much in strength across taxa. Here, we contend that temperature, a critical abiotic ecological factor at a global taxonomic scale, can be a critical modulator of sexual selection. We outline the main pathways by which temperature can affect the strength of s...

An exponential increase in scientific publications requires informative and integrative reviews to provide a detailed synthesis of a particular research field, and this has resulted in the emergence of novel methods for synthesizing heterogeneous research. Research weaving provides a novel framework that combines bibliometrics and systematic mappin...