ORCID Profile
0000-0002-0075-1504
Current Organisation
The University of Edinburgh
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Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 05-11-2019
Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Date: 27-05-2022
Abstract: The rate of adaptive evolution, the contribution of selection to genetic changes that increase mean fitness, is determined by the additive genetic variance in in idual relative fitness. To date, there are few robust estimates of this parameter for natural populations, and it is therefore unclear whether adaptive evolution can play a meaningful role in short-term population dynamics. We developed and applied quantitative genetic methods to long-term datasets from 19 wild bird and mammal populations and found that, while estimates vary between populations, additive genetic variance in relative fitness is often substantial and, on average, twice that of previous estimates. We show that these rates of contemporary adaptive evolution can affect population dynamics and hence that natural selection has the potential to partly mitigate effects of current environmental change.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 15-09-2019
DOI: 10.1111/JEB.13521
Abstract: Warming global temperatures are affecting a range of aspects of wild populations, but the exact mechanisms driving associations between temperature and phenotypic traits may be difficult to identify. Here, we use a 36-year data set on a wild population of red deer to investigate the causes of associations between temperature and two important components of female reproduction: timing of breeding and offspring size. By separating within- versus between-in idual associations with temperature for each trait, we show that within-in idual phenotypic plasticity (changes within a female's lifetime) was entirely sufficient to generate the observed population-level association with temperature at key times of year. However, despite apparently adequate statistical power, we found no evidence of any variation between females in their responses (i.e. no "IxE" interactions). Our results suggest that female deer show plasticity in reproductive traits in response to temperatures in the year leading up to calving and that this response is consistent across in iduals, implying no potential for either selection or heritability of plasticity. We estimate that the plastic response to rising temperatures explained 24% of the observed advance in mean calving date over the study period. We highlight the need for comparable analyses of other systems to determine the contribution of within-in idual plasticity to population-level responses to climate change.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 08-06-2020
DOI: 10.1111/EVO.14000
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 09-2016
Abstract: Costs of reproduction are expected to be ubiquitous in wild animal populations and understanding the drivers of variation in these costs is an important aspect of life-history evolution theory. We use a 43 year dataset from a wild population of red deer to examine the relative importance of two factors that influence the costs of reproduction to mothers, and to test whether these costs vary with changing ecological conditions. Like previous studies, our analyses indicate fitness costs of lactation: mothers whose calves survived the summer subsequently showed lower survival and fecundity than those whose calves died soon after birth, accounting for 5% and 14% of the variation in mothers' survival and fecundity, respectively. The production of a male calf depressed maternal survival and fecundity more than production of a female, but accounted for less than 1% of the variation in either fitness component. There was no evidence for any change in the effect of calf survival or sex with increasing population density.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 17-09-2020
DOI: 10.1101/2020.09.16.299685
Abstract: The paradox of stasis – the unexpectedly slow evolution of heritable traits under direct selection – has been widely documented in the last few decades. This paradox is often particularly acute for body size, which is often heritable and where positive associations of size and fitness are frequently identified, but constraints to the evolution of larger body sizes are often not obvious. Here, we identify a trade-off between survival and size-dependent reproduction in Soay sheep ( Ovis aries ), contributes to selection against large body size. Using recently developed theory on non-linear developmental systems, then decompose total selection of ewe lamb mass along different causal paths to fitness. Larger lambs are more likely to become pregnant, which has a large viability cost. After controlling for this pathway, however, the association between lamb mass and subsequent lifetime fitness is positive. Thus this trade-off does not fully explain stasis of size in tis population, but it does substantially reduce the strength of positive directional selection of size that would otherwise occur. While selection currently favours reduced probability of early pregnancy, largely irrespective of body size, it is likely that the occurrence of early pregnancy could result from adaptation to conditions during a recent period during which population density was much lower.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Josephine Pemberton.