101 years of biofluorescent animal studies: trends in literature, novel hypotheses, and best practices moving forward

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Authors

Russell Gray, Catharina Karlsson

Abstract

Biofluorescent animals have become a recent trend in natural history publishing. While the functions and origins of biofluorescence in fauna remains somewhat controversial, trends in biofluorescence throughout published literature may elucidate these concepts. Here we review 101 years of biofluorescent studies encompassing 108 published papers and 977 unique species records. Our results provide insights into areas of improvement that should be made moving forward in biofluorescent studies and hypotheses to be tested. Collated records of biofluorescent indicate that fluorescence is strongly associated with nocturnal and arboreal lifestyles. Our reconstruction of ancestral lineages based on biofluorescent species records indicate a potential origins and trends in evolution of biofluorescence around the Middle Miocene Climate Optimum (MMCO) where fluorescent color diversity proliferates with declining global temperatures and could possibly be indicative of a widespread climate relict among modern taxa; we therefore term this new concept the Biofluorescent Climate Relict Hypothesis (BCRH).

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/ub6yn

Subjects

Animal Sciences, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences

Keywords

Biofluorescence, Climate Relict Hypothesis, Color, evolution, Middle Miocene Climate Optimum

Dates

Published: 2022-02-06 12:00

License

CC-By Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Data and Code Availability Statement:
Data and code available as supplementary material