Evidence for Expensive Tissue Hypothesis in the Asian Common Toad (Duttaphrynus melanostictus)

Dear Editor, Phenotypic plasticity of an organism by modifying morphological and physiological traits responding to diverse environments is widely recognized across animal taxa (Muñoz-Muñoz et al., 2021; Donihue et al., 2021; Giacomini et al., 2022; Zamora-Camacho et al., 2022; Jiang et al., 2022;Chen et al., 2023). The brain, as a critical phenotypic trait, displays a significant variation in size among different species (Striedter, 2006). Prior research has demonstrated that brain size can serve as an indicator of cognitive abilities and the capacity for local adaptation in response to changing environments (Liao et al., 2022; Jiang et al., 2023).