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UnDisciplined: How will climate change impact how animals mate and reproduce?

Diana Robinson

Temperature affects nearly every part of an animal's day-to-day existence. So it probably shouldn't be surprising that it impacts animal mating, too. So, in a rapidly warming world, hot sex just took on a whole new meaning.

Noah Leith is a PhD candidate at St. Louis University, where he studies how environmental factors shaped the evolution and ecology of animal reproduction. He was the first author of a recent paper in the journal Ecology Letters on the evolutionary interactions between thermal ecology and sexual selection.

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Matthew LaPlante has reported on ritual infanticide in Northern Africa, insurgent warfare in the Middle East, the legacy of genocide in Southeast Asia, and gang violence in Central America. But a few years back, something donned on him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be brutally depressing all the time. Today, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects by writing books about the intersection of science, human health and society, including the New York Times best-selling <i>Lifespan</i> with geneticist David Sinclair and the Nautilus Award-winning <i>Longevity Plan</i> with cardiologist John Day. His first solo book, <i>Superlative</i>, looks at what scientists are learning by studying organisms that have evolved in record-setting ways, and his is currently at work on another book about embracing the inevitability of human-caused climate change with an optimistic outlook on the future.<br/>