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Is the enhanced dispersal rate seen at invasion fronts a behaviourally plastic response to encountering novel ecological conditions?

ABSTRACT: As a population expands into novel areas (as occurs in biological invasions), the range edge becomes dominated by rapidly dispersing individuals-thereby accelerating the rate of population spread. That acceleration has been attributed to evolutionary processes (natural selection and spatial sorting), to which we add a third complementary process: behavioural plasticity. Encountering environmental novelty may directly elicit an increased rate of dispersal. When we reciprocally translocated cane toads (Rhinella marina) among study sites in southern Australia, the transported animals massively increased dispersal rates relative to residents (to an extent similar to the evolved increase between range-core versus invasion-front toad populations in Australia). The responses of these translocated toads show that even range-core toads are capable of the long-distance dispersal rates of invasion-front conspecifics and suggest that rapid dispersal (rather than evolving de novo) has simply been expanded from facultative to constitutive expression.

SUBMITTER: Pettit LJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5046933 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Is the enhanced dispersal rate seen at invasion fronts a behaviourally plastic response to encountering novel ecological conditions?

Pettit Lachlan J LJ Greenlees Matthew J MJ Shine Richard R

Biology letters 20160901 9

As a population expands into novel areas (as occurs in biological invasions), the range edge becomes dominated by rapidly dispersing individuals-thereby accelerating the rate of population spread. That acceleration has been attributed to evolutionary processes (natural selection and spatial sorting), to which we add a third complementary process: behavioural plasticity. Encountering environmental novelty may directly elicit an increased rate of dispersal. When we reciprocally translocated cane t ...[more]

PMID: 27677818

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Project description:It has long been recognized that species occupy a specific ecological niche within their ecosystem. The ecological niche is defined as the number of conditions and resources that limit species distribution. Within their ecological niche, species do not exist in a single physiological state but in a number of states we call the Natural Operating Range. In this paper we link ecological niche theory to physiological ecology by measuring gene expression levels of collembolans exposed to various natural conditions. The soil-dwelling collembolan Folsomia candida was exposed to 26 natural soils with different soil characteristics (soil type, land use, practice, etc). The animals were exposed for two days and gene expression levels were measured. The main factor found to regulate gene expression was the soil type (sand or clay), in which 18.5% of the measured genes were differentially expressed. Gene Ontology analysis showed animals exposed to sandy soils experience general stress, affecting cell homeostasis and replication. Multivariate analysis linking soil chemical data to gene expression data revealed that soil fertility influences gene expression. Land-use and practice had less influence on gene expression; only forest soils showed a different expression pattern. A variation in gene expression variation analysis showed overall low variance in gene expression. The large difference in response to soil type was caused by the soil physicochemical properties where F. candida experiences clay soils and sandy soils as very different from each other. This collembolan prefers fertile soils with high organic matter content, as soil fertility was found to correlate with gene expression and animals exposed to sandy soils (which, in general, have lower organic matter content) experience more general stress. Finally, we conclude that there is no such thing as a fixed physiological state for animals in their ecological niche and the boundary between the ecological niche and a stressed state depends on the genes/pathways investigated.

Dataset Information

Is the enhanced dispersal rate seen at invasion fronts a behaviourally plastic response to encountering novel ecological conditions?

Publications

Is the enhanced dispersal rate seen at invasion fronts a behaviourally plastic response to encountering novel ecological conditions?

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