A unifying, eco‐physiological framework for animal dormancy

By Kathryn Wilsterman, M. Ballinger, C. Williams. Functional Ecology, 2020

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Across the tree of life, the term ‘dormancy’ is used to describe physiological adjustments that enhance survival in temporarily hostile environments (Cáceres, 1997; Geiser, 1998; Hand, 1991; Koštál, 2006). Dormancies have been documented in all animal phyla except Echinodermata (Hand, 1991), and are described using a wide variety of taxon-specific names and definitions (Table 1). Within and among these groups, dormancies span an extremely broad range of physiological states, from the nearly inert, ‘latent life’ state called cryptobiosis exemplified by Tardigrades (Jönsson et al., 2019) to more subtle state of hypometabolism exhibited by some active high latitude ungulates (in winter; Arnold, 2020) and polar bears (in summer; Nelson et al., 1983; Whiteman et al., 2015). Animals undergoing different types of dormancies resemble one another in how behaviour, energy metabolism and environmental sensing are regulated, and these processes are often underpinned by deeply conserved regulatory pathways (Hand et al., 2016). Despite these striking similarities, dormancy research is strongly phylogenetically siloed, with little crosstalk among fields in the primary literature (Box 1). The phylogenetic siloing of these closely related research fields inhibits our ability to answer evolutionary, Received: 31 July 2020 | Accepted: 1 November 2020 DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.13718

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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