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Hamiltonian patterns of age-dependent adaptation to novel environments.

ABSTRACT: Our intuitive understanding of adaptation by natural selection is dominated by the power of selection at early ages in large populations. Yet, as the forces of natural selection fall with adult age, we expect adaptation to be attenuated with age. Explicit simulations of age-dependent adaptation suggest that populations adapt to a novel environment quickly at early ages, but only slowly and incompletely at later adult ages. Experimental tests for age-dependent adaptation to a novel diet were performed on populations of Drosophila melanogaster. The results support the prediction that populations should perform better on an ancestral, long-abandoned diet, compared to an evolutionarily recent diet, only at later ages. D. melanogaster populations also perform poorly on a novel diet compared to an evolutionarily recent diet that has been sustained for hundreds of generations, particularly at earlier ages. Additional experiments demonstrate that the timing of the shift to better performance in our populations on the long-abandoned diet is dependent on when the forces of natural selection weaken in the evolutionary history of experimental populations. Taken together, these experimental findings suggest that the forces of natural selection scale the rate of adaptation to novel environments.

SUBMITTER: Rutledge GA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7531798 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Hamiltonian patterns of age-dependent adaptation to novel environments.

Rutledge Grant A GA Cabral Larry G LG Kuey Brandon J BJ Lee Joshua D JD Mueller Laurence D LD Rose Michael R MR

PloS one 20201002 10

Our intuitive understanding of adaptation by natural selection is dominated by the power of selection at early ages in large populations. Yet, as the forces of natural selection fall with adult age, we expect adaptation to be attenuated with age. Explicit simulations of age-dependent adaptation suggest that populations adapt to a novel environment quickly at early ages, but only slowly and incompletely at later adult ages. Experimental tests for age-dependent adaptation to a novel diet were perf ...[more]

PMID: 33007000

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Project description:Adaptive plasticity allows populations to cope with environmental variation but is expected to fail as conditions become unfamiliar. In novel conditions, populations may instead rely on rapid adaptation to increase fitness and avoid extinction. Adaptation should be fastest when both plasticity and selection occur in directions of the multivariate phenotype that contain abundant genetic variation. However, tests of this prediction from field experiments are rare. Here, we quantify how additive genetic variance in a multivariate phenotype changes across an elevational gradient, and test whether plasticity and selection align with genetic variation. We do so using two closely related, but ecologically distinct, sister species of Sicilian daisy (Senecio, Asteraceae) adapted to high and low elevations on Mt. Etna. Using a quantitative genetic breeding design, we generated and then reciprocally planted c. 19,000 seeds of both species, across an elevational gradient spanning each species' native elevation, and then quantified mortality and five leaf traits of emergent seedlings. We found that genetic variance in leaf traits changed more across elevations than between species. The high-elevation species at novel lower elevations showed changes in the distribution of genetic variance among the leaf traits, which reduced the amount of genetic variance in the directions of selection and the native phenotype. By contrast, the low-elevation species mainly showed changes in the amount of genetic variance at the novel high elevation, and genetic variance was concentrated in the direction of the native phenotype. For both species, leaf trait plasticity across elevations was in a direction of the multivariate phenotype that contained a moderate amount of genetic variance. Together, these data suggest that where plasticity is adaptive, selection on genetic variance for an initially plastic response could promote adaptation. However, large environmental effects on genetic variance are likely to reduce adaptive potential in novel environments.

Dataset Information

Hamiltonian patterns of age-dependent adaptation to novel environments.

Publications

Hamiltonian patterns of age-dependent adaptation to novel environments.

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