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Sex determination

Some like it hot (and some don't)

Nature volume 451, pages 527–528 (2008)Cite this article

There is a widely accepted theoretical explanation for why sex in some species is determined at the embryo stage by environmental factors such as temperature. That theory is now supported by experiment.

How the sex of offspring is determined seems simple enough if you don't look beyond ourselves. For humans, the system is genotypic: two X chromosomes, and you're female; an X and a Y, and you're male. There are plenty of variants of this system, but in many reptiles an entirely different mechanism applies: sex is determined by the temperature of the incubating egg, and clutches can be all-male, all-female or somewhere in between.

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Figure 1: The jacky dragon, Amphibolurus muricatus.

D. GARNETT

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. David Crews and James J. Bull are in the Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. crews@mail.utexas.edu bull@mail.utexas.edu,

    David Crews & James J. Bull

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  1. David Crews
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  2. James J. Bull
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Crews, D., Bull, J. Some like it hot (and some don't). Nature 451, 527–528 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/451527a

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