Ian Clifton

Florida International University | FIU · Department of Biological Sciences

Thermoregulatory behaviour enables ectotherms to maintain preferred body temperatures across a range of environmental conditions, and it may buffer individuals against the effects of climate warming. In lizards, the mechanism underlying variation in thermoregulatory behaviour has long been assumed to be phenotypic plasticity, and while this assumpt...

A variety of phenotypic traits in reptiles are affected by conditions during embryonic development, a phenomenon known as developmental plasticity. In particular, many traits in which expression changes with temperature, such as locomotor performance or growth rates, are also developmentally plastic. However, much less is known about the extent to...

An individual’s morphology is shaped by the environmental pressures it experiences, and the resulting morphological response is the culmination of both genetic factors and environmental (non‐genetic) conditions experienced early in its life (i.e., phenotypic plasticity). The role phenotypic plasticity plays in shaping phenotypes is important, but e...

Global climate change involves both prolonged periods of higher‐than‐normal temperatures and short but extreme heat waves. Both types of temperature increases are likely to be detrimental to ectotherms, and even if such temperature increases do not cause mortality directly, compensating for such temperature increases will likely entail costs to org...

Mean prey size often varies across landscapes, resulting in predator populations having differing access to energetic resources. Shifts in resource quality are likely to cause differences in energy allocation of reproduction. Thus, additional energy intake may lead to (i) increased offspring size, (ii) increased numbers of offspring, (iii) increase...

Colonization of new areas is accompanied by a variety of novel pressures, which can lead to rapid phenotypic change. We compared morphology of diamond-backed watersnakes (Nerodia rhombifer) among populations of recently colonized fish farms to examine responses to a potential selective pressure, prey size and evaluated intersexual differences in ph...