Similar forces may select for gender switching across taxa in all animals with this facility.
Abstract
Sex change occurs in a variety of animals, including fish, echinoderms, crustaceans, molluscs and polychaete worms1. Here we show that the relative timing of sex change is surprisingly invariant across all animals: 91–97% of the variation in size at sex change across species can be explained by the simple rule that individuals change sex when they reach 72% of their maximum size. This suggests that there is a fundamental similarity across all animals, from a 2-mm-long crustacean to a 1.5-m-long fish (Fig. 1), in the underlying forces that select for sex change.
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J. RANDALL
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Allsop, D., West, S. Changing sex at the same relative body size. Nature 425, 783–784 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/425783a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/425783a
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