干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Gloger’s rule posits that darker birds are found more often in humid environments than in arid ones, especially in the tropics. Accordingly, desert-inhabiting animals tend to be light-colored. This rule is also true for certain mammalian groups, including humans. Gloger’s rule is manifested at 2 levels: (1) at the species level (different populations of the same species have different pigmentation at different latitudes), and (2) at the species assembly level (different taxa at a certain geography have different pigmentation than other taxa found at different habitats or latitudes). Concerning plants, Gloger’s rule was first proposed to operate in many plant species growing in sand dunes, sandy shores and in deserts, because of being white, whitish, or silver colored, based on white trichomes, because of sand grains and clay particles glued to sticky glandular trichomes, or because of light-colored waxes. Recently, Gloger’s rule was shown to also be true at the intraspecific level in relation to protection of anthers from UV irradiation. While Gloger’s rule is true in certain plant taxa and ecologies, there are others where anti-Gloger coloration patterns exist. In some of these the selective agents are known and in others they are not. I present both Gloger and anti-Gloger cases and argue that this largely neglected aspect of plant biology deserves much more research attention.