Deserts and semi-deserts, such as the Sahara-Sahel region in North Africa, are exposed environments with restricted 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 the Sahara-Sahel have repeatedly evolved an accurate background matching against visually-guided predators. Top-down selection by predators is therefore assumed to drive the evolution of a generalist, or compromise, camouflage strategy in these rodents. Spanning 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 investigate which adaptations facilitate species persistence in a mosaic of habitats undergoing climatic change. Studies of these widely distributed communities permits general conclusions about the processes driving adaptation and can give insights into how diversity evolves.
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12 August 2020
Camouflage in arid environments: the case of Sahara-Sahel desert rodents
Ossi Nokelainen,
Lekshmi B. Sreelatha,
José Carlos Brito,
João C. Campos,
Nicholas E. Scott-Samuel,
Janne K. Valkonen,
Zbyszek Boratyński
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Journal of Vertebrate Biology
Vol. 69 • No. 2
June 2020
Vol. 69 • No. 2
June 2020
Africa
Background matching
crypsis
predation
protective colouration