Evolution of environmental sex determination from genotypic sex determination

Environmental sex determination in reptiles

In recent years, representatives of more than 40 families of reptiles have been studied to understand how environmental parameters affect sex determination. In this review, we summarise the distribution and taxonomic pattern of sex determining mechanisms, outline the main hypotheses of the adaptive significance of temperature sex determination (TSD), and of skewed population sex ratios. We also...

Exploring the evolution of environmental sex determination, especially in reptiles.

Environmental sex determination has been documented in a variety of organisms for many decades and the adaptive significance of this unusual sex-determining mechanism has been clarified empirically in most cases. In contrast, temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) in amniote vertebrates, first noted 40 years ago in a lizard, has defied a general satisfactory evolutionary explanation desp...

Sex-specific survival to maturity and the evolution of environmental sex determination.

Four decades ago, it was proposed that environmental sex determination (ESD) evolves when individual fitness depends on the environment in a sex-specific fashion--a form of condition-dependent sex allocation. Many biological processes have been hypothesized to drive this sex asymmetry, yet a general explanation for the evolution of sex-determining mechanisms remains elusive. Here, we develop a ...

The Evolution of Sex Determination in Animals

Sex determination

struggled for years with parasites that evolve resistance to commonly used drugs. Why should it be any different in animals? Yet as far as we know, no study has ever looked at whether parasites become resistant to the chemicals in the plants that hosts use for protection, though in the Drosophila example referenced above, ethanol did not negatively affect larvae of specialist wasps as strongly ...