Animal Biology &
Animal Husbandry

The sensory drive hypothesis provides an integrative framework for understanding how environmental conditions shape the evolution of sensory systems, communication signals, signaling behavior, and habitat use. This mini-review synthesizes current evidence on the role of environmental constraints in signal evolution across aquatic and terrestrial organisms, with particular emphasis on visual, acoustic, multimodal, and chemosensory communication. The available evidence indicates that sensory drive is particularly well supported in aquatic visual systems, where variation in light environment can influence both sensory tuning and the evolution of visual signals. Acoustic communication provides complementary evidence, demonstrating that habitat structure and environmental noise can shape signal transmission and promote changes in signal characteristics and signaling behavior. Multimodal systems further reveal that environmental conditions may generate trade-offs or complementary patterns of investment among signaling modalities. However, environmental effects on signals do not necessarily coincide with parallel changes in sensory systems. Conserved sensory traits, morphological constraints, predation risk, foraging requirements, and other ecological pressures may restrict or redirect evolutionary responses. Chemosensation represents an important but comparatively underexplored component of sensory drive. Overall, the evidence supports sensory drive as a context-dependent evolutionary framework in which environmental conditions establish selective pressures, while the resulting evolutionary trajectories depend on the functional constraints and evolvability of both signalers and receivers.

Temperature is a fundamental ecological factor that shapes the expression of reproductive traits and the dynamics of sexual selection in ectothermic animals. This mini-review synthesizes current evidence on how thermal conditions influence sexually selected signals, mate preferences, reproductive behaviour, mating dynamics, gamete performance, and sex-specific reproductive responses across diverse ectotherm taxa. Available evidence indicates that temperature can modify visual, vibratory, acoustic, and colour-based sexual signals, while simultaneously altering female preferences and the degree of signal-preference coupling. Thermal variation may therefore either maintain or disrupt the correspondence between male signals and female choice, with important consequences for mating success. Temperature also constrains reproductive activity by modifying activity windows, thermoregulatory behaviour, courtship opportunities, and the allocation of energy to reproduction. Beyond pre-copulatory processes, thermal conditions affect sperm quantity and quality, sperm competition, fecundity, fertility, and post-copulatory sexual selection. Importantly, males and females may differ in their thermal sensitivity, producing sex-specific effects on reproductive success and potentially modifying the strength and direction of sexual selection. The evidence further suggests that thermal plasticity is often insufficient to compensate for rapidly changing thermal environments. Consequently, warming may generate mismatches between sexual signals, mate preferences, reproductive physiology, and environmental conditions, with implications for population viability and evolutionary adaptation. Understanding the reciprocal interactions between thermal ecology and sexual selection is therefore essential for predicting how ectothermic organisms will respond evolutionarily to ongoing climate change.

Dispersal is a complex and evolutionarily important phenotype that integrates behavioural, physiological, genetic, and ecological processes across its three major stages: departure, transfer, and settlement. Rather than representing a random subset of individuals, dispersers frequently differ from residents in personality traits such as boldness, exploration, aggression, risk-taking, and sociability, giving rise to personality-dependent dispersal syndromes. Increasing evidence indicates that dispersal has a substantial genetic component and is generally governed by a polygenic architecture, with candidate genes and molecular pathways associated with circadian regulation, neurobiological function, locomotor performance, and other physiological processes. The expression and evolutionary consequences of dispersal are strongly context-dependent, reflecting interactions between genetic variation, environmental conditions, habitat dynamics, and life-history trade-offs. Dispersal also co-evolves with social behaviour and can generate persistent behavioural and social polymorphisms within populations. At the population level, variation in dispersal directly influences gene flow, kin structure, genetic diversity, inbreeding, population differentiation, colonization, and local adaptation. Anthropogenic habitat modification can further alter dispersal phenotypes and their genetic consequences, demonstrating that changes in landscape dynamics may generate substantial eco-evolutionary effects. Overall, dispersal should be regarded not simply as movement between populations, but as an integrated behavioural and genetic trait whose evolution can reshape both individual fitness and population genetic structure. Understanding these interactions requires approaches that combine behavioural ecology, quantitative genetics, molecular genomics, demography, and environmental context.