Hurricane effects on Neotropical lizards span geographic and phylogenetic scales

Extreme climate events can act as agents of natural selection. We demonstrate that lizards hit by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 passed on their large, strong-gripping toepads to the next generation of lizards. Moreover, we found that across 12 insular populations of Anolis sagrei, and 188 Anolis species across the Neotropics, those hit by more hurricanes in the last 70 y tended to have proportionately larger toepads. Our study suggests that hurricanes can have long-term and large-scale evolutionary impacts that transcend biogeographic and phylogenetic scales. As hurricanes become more severe due to climate change, these extreme climate events may have a much larger impact on the evolutionary trajectory of the affected ecological communities than previously appreciated.