John Rodgers giving his talk at SICB 2025
The local nesting environment that anole eggs experience—temperature, substrate type, or moisture content of the soil—can be important to embryonic development. However, there is a gap in research that combines these factors and looks at their relative contributions to the variation in offspring phenotypes.
John Rodgers, a Master’s student in Daniel Warner’s lab at Auburn University, presented his findings on this topic—which he conducted as part of his undergraduate research—at SICB 2025.
John explained how brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) are a great organism to study the effect of environmental nesting conditions on egg and embryo development, as they lay one egg at a time and there’s previous research determining that temperature and moisture of the environment can affect phenotypes of hatchlings.
For this experiment, eggs were collected from the wild and placed among eight different treatments which varied in moisture, temperature, and substrate material. From these treatments, John measured egg mass over time, time taken for full embryonic development, hatchling body size (snout-vent length), and mass. John observed that warmer temperature treatments sped up embryo development by an average of 10 days, as well as increasing egg growth over time.
John also found that increased moisture significantly increased growth of both the eggs and the hatchlings. However, the impacts of both temperature and moisture operate mainly in isolation: there doesn’t appear to be a clear interaction between these variables. Additionally, there was no significant impact of the substrate type.
Previous research from the Warner Lab has demonstrated that hatchling mass and rate of development can have fitness effects, meaning these findings could help our understanding of the potential impacts of changing environment on the survival of anoles. John continues to work with anoles, asking more questions about habitat use!
Check out John’s research in more detail here.
- SICB 2025: Nesting Environments’ Impact on Growth - January 18, 2025
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