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Adaptations that facilitate the reception of long‐range signals under challenging conditions are expected to generate signal diversity when species communicate in different habitats. Although we have a general understanding of how individual communicating animals cope with conditions influencing signal detection, the extent to which plasticity and evolutionary changes in signal characteristics contribute...
Environmental effects on mating system expression are central to understanding mating system evolution in nature. Here, I report the results from a quantitative‐genetic experiment aimed at understanding the role of predation risk in the expression and evolution of life‐history and mating‐system traits in a hermaphroditic freshwater snail (Physa acuta). I reared 30 full‐sib families in four environments...
In hermaphrodites, traits that influence the selfing rate can coevolve with inbreeding depression, leading to the emergence of evolutionary syndromes. Theory predicts a negative correlation between inbreeding depression and selfing rate across species. This prediction has only been examined and validated in vascular plants. Furthermore, selfing rates are often influenced by environmental conditions...
Environmental canalization is defined as a reduction in the effect of external environmental perturbations on a phenotype, while phenotypic plasticity is defined as the production of different phenotypes in alternative environments. These terms describe different aspects of the same phenomenon, that is, the sensitivity of the phenotype to the environment. Genetic regulation of the environmental sensitivity...
Divergent selection pressures across environments can result in phenotypic differentiation that is due to local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, or both. Trinidadian guppies exhibit local adaptation to the presence or absence of predators, but the degree to which predator‐induced plasticity contributes to population differentiation is less clear. We conducted common garden experiments on guppies...
Fluctuating environments are expected to select for individuals that have highest geometric fitness over the experienced environments. This leads to the prediction that genetically determined environmental robustness in fitness, and average fitness across environments should be positively genetically correlated to fitness in fluctuating environments. Because quantitative genetic experiments resolving...
In response to our previous study, Liefting et al. argue, in defense of their work on latitudinal variation of developmental‐rate reaction norms (RNs), that (1) developmental rate (the reciprocal of development time: rate = time−1) is a more biologically relevant variable than development time; (2) the linear RN model is a valid approximation; and (3) three experimental points suffice to estimate...
Rocha and Klaczko emphasize the general complexity of reaction norm shape and caution that ignoring such complexity can be misleading when forcing nonlinear reaction norms into linear shapes. They refer to our article on differences in plasticity of Drosophila serrata populations along a latitudinal gradient as an example of a misleading simplifying approach. However, their claim that an artifact...
The spectacular species richness of cichlids and their diversity in morphology, coloration, and behavior have made them an ideal model for the study of speciation and adaptive evolution. Hypertrophic lips evolved repeatedly and independently in African and Neotropical cichlid radiations. Cichlids with hypertrophic lips forage predominantly in rocky crevices and it has been hypothesized that mechanical...
Polyphenism, the expression of discrete alternative phenotypes, is often a consequence of a developmental switch. Physiological changes induced by a developmental switch potentially affect reaction norms, but the evolution and existence of alternative reaction norms remains poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate that, in the butterfly Pieris napi (Lepidoptera: Pieridae), thermal reaction norms of...
Phenotypically plastic characters may respond to multiple variables in their environment, but the evolutionary consequences of this phenomenon have rarely been addressed theoretically. We model the evolution of linear reaction norms in response to several correlated environmental variables, in a population undergoing stationary environmental fluctuations. At evolutionary equilibrium, the linear combination...
Analysis of reaction norms, the functions by which the phenotype produced by a given genotype depends on the environment, is critical to studying many aspects of phenotypic evolution. Different techniques are available for quantifying different aspects of reaction norm variation. We examine what biological inferences can be drawn from some of the more readily applicable analyses for studying reaction...
Phenotypic plasticity is thought to be an important mechanism for adapting to environmental heterogeneity. Nonetheless, the genetic basis of plasticity is still not well understood. In Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans, body size and thermal stress resistance show clinal patterns along the east coast of Australia, and exhibit plastic responses to different developmental temperatures. The genetic...
Phenotypic plasticity is thought to impact evolutionary trajectories by shifting trait values in a direction that is either favored by natural selection (“adaptive” plasticity) or disfavored (“nonadaptive” plasticity). However, it is unclear how commonly each of these types of plasticity occurs in natural populations. To answer this question, we measured glucosinolate defensive chemistry and reproductive...
Earth's temperature is increasing due to anthropogenic CO emissions; and organisms need either to adapt to higher temperatures, migrate into colder areas, or face extinction. Temperature affects nearly all aspects of an organism's physiology via its influence on metabolic rate and protein structure, therefore genetic adaptation to increased temperature may be much harder to achieve compared to other...
Understanding the genetic architecture of life history plasticity may inform resilience under environmental change, but relatively little is known for the inhabitants of unpredictable wet‐dry tropical environments. Here, I explore the quantitative genetics of juvenile growth and development relative to hostplant phenology in the butterfly Eurema hecabe. Wet season generations of this species breed...
Forms of phenotypic plasticity in key traits, and forms of selection on and genetic variation in such plasticity, fundamentally underpin phenotypic, population dynamic, and evolutionary responses to environmental variation and directional change. Accordingly, numerous theoretical and empirical studies have examined properties and consequences of plasticity, primarily considering traits that are continuously...
Life‐history phenotypes emerge from clusters of traits that are the product of genes and phenotypic plasticity. If the impact of the environment differs substantially between traits, then life histories might not evolve as a cohesive whole. We quantified the sensitivity of components of the life history to food availability, a key environmental difference in the habitat occupied by contrasting ecotypes,...
Organisms can often respond adaptively to a change in their environment through phenotypic plasticity in multiple traits, a phenomenon termed as multivariate plasticity. These different plastic responses could interact and affect each other's development as well as selection on each other, but the causes and consequences of these interactions have received relatively little attention. Here, we propose...
Genetic assimilation is a process that leads to reduced phenotypic plasticity during adaptation to novel conditions, a potentially important phenomenon under global environmental change. Null expectations when testing for genetic assimilation, however, are not always clear. For instance, the statistical artifact of regression to the mean could bias us toward detecting genetic assimilation when it...
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