School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TQ, UK.
Department of Biosciences, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK.
Science. 2017 Aug 4;357(6350). doi: 10.1126/science.aan0221.
Coloration mediates the relationship between an organism and its environment in important ways, including social signaling, antipredator defenses, parasitic exploitation, thermoregulation, and protection from ultraviolet light, microbes, and abrasion. Methodological breakthroughs are accelerating knowledge of the processes underlying both the production of animal coloration and its perception, experiments are advancing understanding of mechanism and function, and measurements of color collected noninvasively and at a global scale are opening windows to evolutionary dynamics more generally. Here we provide a roadmap of these advances and identify hitherto unrecognized challenges for this multi- and interdisciplinary field.
颜色以重要的方式在生物体与其环境之间进行中介，包括社会信号、抗捕食防御、寄生虫利用、体温调节以及对紫外线、微生物和磨损的保护。方法上的突破正在加速对动物颜色产生及其感知背后的过程的了解，实验正在推进对机制和功能的理解，并且对非侵入性和全球范围内收集的颜色的测量正在为更广泛的进化动态打开窗口。在这里，我们提供了这些进展的路线图，并确定了这个多学科领域迄今为止尚未被认识到的挑战。
