Work packages
WP1 – Project management, communication, open data and animal welfare
In WP1, the project manager will coordinate networking activities, communication and exchange of documents and data. We will organize regular remote meetings emphasizing daily activities and one annual meeting including all participants. Staff recruitment will be managed by each partner in agreement with the coordinator and all implicated partners. The project manager will coordinate the open data and animal welfare policy. External communication will be coordinated by Cistude Nature.
WP2 – Thermal plasticity and pace-of-life acceleration inside viviparous populations
This activity aims at testing if an average increase in ambient temperatures leads to a reduction in generation time associated with faster growth and sexual maturation, greater early life reproductive effort, but reduced longevity and accelerated senescence. Here, we will investigate comprehensively warming effects on life history strategies using long-term field data of viviparous populations in the Massif Central region with two complementary data sets. We will combine these analyses with an exceptional common garden experiment in the Terrestrial Metatron designed to test the causal relationship between summer warming and early life history across the geographic range.
WP3 – Thermal plasticity and pace-of-life acceleration inside oviparous populations
We hypothesize that populations with an oviparous reproductive mode are located on a faster line of the life history continuum than viviparous populations. To test this, we will extend our comparative analysis to oviparous populations from Southwestern France. Our preliminary investigations identified sites spreading from sea level to the mountain range of the Pyrenees, where common lizards face a wide diversity of climates and occupy a range of habitats. The possibility to reproduce our analysis of pace-of-life acceleration in closely related oviparous populations will open a window to understanding this key evolutionary innovation and its ecological consequences
WP4 – Increased risks of tipping points and population decline
This activity is aimed at testing causal environmental factors and sensitive life stages during which warmer conditions increase the risks of reaching critical physiological tipping points. In earlier studies with viviparous common lizards, we found decreased body condition maintenance below critical temperatures due to the interaction of multiple stressors such as high nighttime temperatures, limited food intake and water deprivation. Cross-sectional surveys of viviparous populations further indicate that high nighttime temperatures during the summer time are more predictive of pace-of-life acceleration than high daytime temperature. Here, we will test these hypotheses and refine proximate mechanisms involved in pace-of-life acceleration using 3 sets of controlled laboratory experiments with wild lizards from both reproductive modes.
WP5 – Physiological assays of oxidative stress and telomere biology
To clarify the proximate physiological mechanisms involved in pace-of-life acceleration, we will focus on non-energetic trade-offs between production and maintenance (oxidative stress including DNA damage and telomere biology), since this trade-off is a central one involved in the regulation of the pace-of-life. We will conduct a number of biological assays in lizards from WP2, WP3 and WP4, where we will (i) measure TL using a qPCR method, (ii) quantify blood oxidative balance including reactive oxygen species (ROS, mostly organic hydroperoxides) and antioxidant capacity (total antioxidant barrier), and (iii) measure DNA oxidative damages and repair mechanisms.