A membership society whose goal is to advance and to diffuse knowledge of organic evolution and other broad biological principles so as to enhance the conceptual unification of the biological sciences.
Posted on
Tomos Potter, Ronald D. Bassar, Paul Bentzen, Emily W. Ruell, Julián Torres-Dowdall, Corey A. Handelsman, Cameron K. Ghalambor, Joseph Travis, David N. Reznick, and Tim Coulson (Jan 2021)
Increased population density drives evolution in wild guppies, but also confounds estimation of genetic change
Read the Article (Just Accepted)
Detecting contemporary evolution requires demonstrating that genetic change has occurred. Mixed-effects models allow estimation of quantitative genetic parameters and are widely used to study evolution in wild populations. However, predictions of evolution based on these parameters frequently fail to match observations. Here, we applied three commonly used quantitative genetic approaches to predict the evolution of size at maturity in a wild population of Trinidadian guppies. Crucially, we tested our predictions against evolutionary change observed in common garden experiments performed on samples from the same population. We show that standard quantitative genetic models underestimated or failed to detect the cryptic evolution of this trait as demonstrated by the common garden experiments. The models failed because: 1) size at maturity and fitness both decreased with increases in population density, 2) offspring experienced higher population densities than their parents, and 3) selection on size was strongest at high densities. When we accounted for environmental change, predictions better matched observations in the common garden experiments, although substantial uncertainty remained. Our results demonstrate that predictions of evolution are unreliable if environmental change is not appropriately captured in models.