Abstract
Deserts and semi-deserts, such as Sahara-Sahel region in North Africa, are exposed environments with limited vegetation coverage. Due to limited physical surface structures, these open areas provide a promising ecosystem to understand selection for crypsis. Here, we review knowledge on camouflage adaptation in the Sahara-Sahel rodent community, which represents one of the best documented cases of phenotype-environment convergence comprising a marked taxonomic diversity. Through their evolutionary history, several rodent species from Sahara-Sahel have repeatedly evolved an accurate background matching against visually-guided predators. A top-down selection by predators is therefore assumed to drive the evolution of a generalist, or compromise, camouflage strategy in these rodents. Spanning over a large biogeographic extent and surviving repeated climatic shifts, the community faces extreme and heterogeneous selective pressures, allowing formulation of testable ecological hypotheses. Consequently, Sahara-Sahel rodents poses an exceptional system to test which adaptations facilitate species persistence in a mosaic of habitats and over climatic change. This is important, because studies of widely distributed communities permits generalizing conclusions about processes driving adaptations and understanding how diversity evolves
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 1-12 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Journal of Vertebrate Biology |
Volume | 69 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 12 Aug 2020 |
Research Groups and Themes
- Cognitive Science
- Visual Perception
Keywords
- Africa
- background matching
- camouflage
- Crypsis
- predation
- protective colouration