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Do developmentally robust phenotypes evolve over the evolutionary history of a genus, and if so, how? Kalay et al. found that segmentation along the head to tail axis, a robust phenotype, has evolved in Drosophila over the evolutionary history of the genus, primarily through many small changes.
Many cells in the thorax of Drosophila were found to stall during replication, a phenomenon known as underreplication. Unlike underreplication in nuclei of salivary and follicle cells, this stall occurs with less than one complete round of replication. This stall point allows precise estimations of early‐replicating euchromatin and late‐replicating heterochromatin regions, providing a powerful tool...
Urbanization is intensifying worldwide, and while some species tolerate and even exploit urban environments, many others are excluded entirely from this new habitat. Understanding the factors that underlie tolerance of urbanization is thus of rapidly growing importance. Here, we examine urban tolerance across a diverse group of lizards: Caribbean members of the neotropical genus Anolis. Our analyses...
Species can evolve diverse strategies to survive periods of uncertainty. Animals may either invest in energy storage, allowing them to decrease foraging costs, such as locomotion or risk of predation, or they may invest in better cognitive abilities helping them to flexibly adapt their behavior to meet novel challenges. Here, we test this idea of a fat‐brain trade‐off in 38 species of Chinese anurans...
Conflicting selection is an important evolutionary mechanism because it impedes directional evolution and helps to maintain phenotypic variation. It can arise when mutualistic and antagonistic selective agents exert opposing selection on the same trait and when distinct phenotypic optima are favored by different fitness components. In this study, we test for conflicting selection through different...
As species richness varies along the tree of life, there is a great interest in identifying factors that affect the rates by which lineages speciate or go extinct. To this end, theoretical biologists have developed a suite of phylogenetic comparative methods that aim to identify where shifts in diversification rates had occurred along a phylogeny and whether they are associated with some traits. Using...
The role of genetic architecture in adaptation to novel environments has received considerable attention when the source of adaptive variation is de novo mutation. Relatively less is known when the source of adaptive variation is inter‐ or intraspecific hybridization. We model hybridization between divergent source populations and subsequent colonization of an unoccupied novel environment using individual‐based...
Evolutionary rescue can prevent populations from declining under climate change, and should be more likely at high‐latitude, “leading” edges of species’ ranges due to greater temperature anomalies and gene flow from warm‐adapted populations. Using a resurrection study with seeds collected before and after a 7‐year period of record warming, we tested for thermal adaptation in the scarlet monkeyflower...
Rates of climatic niche evolution vary widely across the tree of life and are strongly associated with rates of diversification among clades. However, why the climatic niche evolves more rapidly in some clades than others remains unclear. Variation in life history traits often plays a key role in determining the environmental conditions under which species can survive, and therefore, could impact...
Natural variation as well as human impacts can alter the light environment in lakes in ways that affect aquatic host‐parasite interactions. In laboratory infection assays, Rogalski and Duffy (2020) determine that the bacterial parasite Pasteuria ramosa adapts to solar radiation by increasing its transmission potential to its zooplankton host, Daphnia dentifera. Local adaptation to light can allow...
There is no general explanation for why species have restricted geographic distributions. One hypothesis posits that range expansion or increasing scarcity of suitable habitat results in accumulation of mutational load due to enhanced genetic drift, which constrains population performance toward range limits and further expansion. We tested this hypothesis in the North American plant, Arabidopsis lyrata...
Experimental and theoretical studies have highlighted the impact of gene flow on the probability of evolutionary rescue in structured habitats. Mathematical modeling and simulations of evolutionary rescue in spatially or otherwise structured populations showed that intermediate migration rates can often maximize the probability of rescue in gradually or abruptly deteriorating habitats. These theoretical...
Organisms are exposed to environmental and mutational effects influencing both mean and variance of phenotypes. Potentially deleterious effects arising from this variation can be reduced by the evolution of buffering (canalizing) mechanisms, ultimately reducing phenotypic variability. There has been interest regarding the conditions enabling the evolution of canalization. Under some models, the circumstances...
Many animals breed exclusively in plants that accumulate rainwater (phytotelma; e.g., bromeliad, bamboo, fruit husk, and tree hole), to which they are either physiologically or behaviorally specialized for this microhabitat. Of the numerous life‐history modes observed in frogs, few are as striking or potentially consequential as the transition from pond‐ or stream‐breeding to the deposition of eggs...
How do emergent properties of natural plant communities affect floral evolution? In this issue, Eisen et al. explored this question by studying selection on floral traits in natural communities of Clarkia species. They found that two community properties, namely congeneric species richness and floral density (of conspecifics and heterospecifics), influenced the patterns of selection, although not...
Reproductive isolation can result from incompatibilities between mutations that arise in different individuals. Wang and Cooper examined this mechanism of postzygotic isolation in Escherichia coli experimentally evolved in either glucose or lactose. They formed recombinants from parents evolved in the same or different environments. Both same‐environment and different‐environment recombinants had...
As a dispersive lineage expands its distribution across a heterogeneous landscape, it leaves behind allopatric populations with varying degrees of geographic isolation that often differentiate rapidly. In the case of oceanic islands, even narrowly separated populations often differentiate, which seems contrary to the highly dispersive nature of the founding lineage. This pattern of highly dispersive...
Although the evolution and diversification of flowers is often attributed to pollinator‐mediated selection, interactions between co‐occurring plant species can alter patterns of selection mediated by pollinators and other agents. The extent to which both floral density and congeneric species richness affect patterns of net and pollinator‐mediated selection on multiple co‐occurring species in a community...
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