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t pigeon g festa bianchet m pelletier f 2017 long term fitness consequences of early environment in a long lived ungulate proc r soc b 284 adam hayward the conditions which an individual organism experiences during early development have a profound effect on their success in life for example poor maternal nutrition may lead to underdeveloped or small offspring which are likely to have reduced fitness in later life a host of studies in the lab and field have shown that the quality of environmental conditions nutrition population density climate predation infection during early life are strongly associated with body mass survival ageing rates reproductive success disease resistance and lifespan there are two non mutually exclusive explanations for why early life conditions influence later performance first a non adaptive explanation if conditions are good development is good and the individual is well set up for a successful life if conditions are bad development is sub optimal in some way and the individual struggles this is known as the silver spoon hypothesis although the who would call it the plastic spoon hypothesis and under this scenario a bad start in life always leads to poor performance in adulthood second an adaptive explanation the individual senses its environment during development assumes that it reflects the environment it will encounter later on and develops in such a way as to maximise its performance under those conditions under this scenario if conditions match during early and later life no matter how bad those conditions are individuals will have higher fitness this is the predictive adaptive response hypothesis and it has been a popular but controversial explanation for the origins of metabolic disease in humans few studies have tested for predictive adaptive responses in long lived wild animal populations because it s difficult such a test requires measurement of environmental conditions in early life plus measures of both environmental conditions and performance in later life gabriel pigeon and colleagues from the university of sherbrooke in canada used more than 40 years of data on a bighorn sheep population to test for predictive adaptive responses in a recent paper they concentrated on female sheep and asked whether 1 probability of weaning a lamb and 2 probability of survival in a given year were dependent on early life environmental conditions current conditions and an interaction between the two they tested 12 different environment variables including population density and a large number of climatic variables although only density was important with the hypothesis being that higher density more competition poorer nutrition they ran a large number of models for both response variables including linear and non linear effects of early life variables and crucially interactions between early life and current conditions they also attempted to separate out within and between cohort and individual effects which was rather cool using a really nice approach developed a few years ago in short it was pretty thorough population density at birth explained 32 of variation in weaning success females born in high density years were less able to wean lambs there was also an interaction with current population density in high density years females were less likely to wean lambs but this was only true of females who experienced high density around birth themselves in other words experiencing poor conditions in early life made individuals less able to deal with poor conditions in early life figure a below however population density at birth was very weakly and non significantly associated with survival figure b below there were some interesting if rather mind bending results concerning how the current population density influenced weaning success illustrated below in the si where i went digging so you other pege members don t have to in a each line represents the change in weaning success with increasing current density in a given cohort and the redder the line the higher the early density was in that cohort there are between cohort effects because the cohorts are responding differently to current density however there is no average within cohort effect because the average cohort would show a line with a slope of approximately zero in b each line represents an individual there are between individual effects because individuals who experienced higher current density had lower fitness but there are no within individual effects because all individuals responded in a similar manner to increases in density this suggests the absence of individual plasticity and that density affects all members of a cohort in a similar way the main conclusion of the paper is that analyses did not support a predictive adaptive response this is perhaps not surprising given similar conclusions in a recent ish meta analysis of experimental studies in plants and short lived animals and even some not especially convincing ok it s mine stuff on humans using data on climate and famines predictive adaptive responses are an incredibly intuitive and lovely hypothesis at first glance i ve found this when teaching undergraduates given the question how can low nutrition during gestation lead to diabetes in later life one or two will always come up with the idea of predicting the future environment evidence in support of such responses are rare though an interesting question to ask is how predictive is predictive do the fitness benefits of developmental plasticity need to arise when you re halfway through life reaching sexual maturity surviving to weaning fledging surviving the pre natal period all have been suggested but the best examples of predictive adaptive responses for me are very short term responses one in voles and one in humans are they predictive or even adaptive it s up for debate share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email print opens in new window print like loading filed under ecology evolution tagged with diabetes population density predictive adaptive response silver spoon fundamental theorems of evolution april 26 2017 by lynsey83 leave a comment queller 2017 fundamental theorems of evolution the american naturalist 189 345 353 figure 1 from queller 2017 illustrating the relationship between the price equation and four other fundamental equations of evolutionary biology an arrow from one equation to another indicates that the latter can be derived form the former variables and subscripts are explained in the main text brad duthie conceptual unification of disparate phenomena is a major goal of theory in the natural sciences and many of the most revolutionary scientific theories are those that have shown how seemingly disparate ideas and observations follow logically from a single unifying framework the most momentous of these theories include newton s unification of gravity and the laws of planetary motion darwin s explanations of adaptation and biodiversity as following from natural selection and descent with modification respectively and einstein s general relativity unifying gravity space and time in all of these examples theory has changed how scientists understand the world by revealing a fundamental concept the consequences of which encompass an entire field of study perhaps to this list of discoveries we should include the unifying equation of george price which in a recent paper in the american naturalist david queller argues to be the most fundamental theorem of evolution the price equation as a unifying framework has been a subject of recent interest both within evolutionary biology and across disciplines from mechanics to music at its core the price equation is a unifying framework for understanding any correlated change between any two entities queller proposes it to be fundamental because it encompasses all evolutionary forces acting on a population and because it can be used to derive other less general equations in population and quantitative genetics all of which require stricter assumptions about the evolutionary forces and environmental conditions affecting entities in the population the price equation includes two terms to describe the change in any trait δz the first term isolates how a trait z covaries with fitness w for entities i and encompasses the evolutionary processes of natural selection and drift the second term encompasses everything else that affects trait change often called the transmission bias such as mutation or background changes in environment intepreting the price equation can be a bit daunting at first perhaps in part because of how abstract the entities i are representing anything from alleles to unmeasured genotypes to organisms to even groups of organisms as the situation requires likewise traits z can be any aspect of phenotype associated with such entities including fitness w itself it s here where queller s synthesis really shines as he carefully walks the reader through how price s abstract equation can be used to derive multiple other less fundamental equations in which variables represent something concrete and measureable in empirical populations these equations include fischer s average excess equation describing allele frequency change in population genetics the robertson and breeder s equations of trait change in quantitative genetics and fischer s fundamental theorem of evolution in all cases queller notes the additional assumptions that are required to use these equations particularly that the second term of the price equation equals zero meaning that no transmission bias exists in our discussion we reviewed the price equation and its importance in evolutionary biology we noted the interesting timeline of the discoveries of the equations although the price equation is fundamental in the sense that all of the other equations that queller cites can be derived from it it is also the most recent equation to be published all of the other equations which serve fundamental roles in population or quantitative genetics were published decades before price s equation and have been used regularly by specialists in these sub fields this led us to talk a bit about what we value from theorems in evolutionary biology and whether all of these theorems are better taught as independent solutions to particular problems in evolutionary biology or as sub components of a more fundamental framework grounded in the price equation finally we discussed the second term of the price equation noting that all of the equations that can be derived from the price equation assume that this term equals zero this effectively isolates natural selection or some partition of natural selection but ignores processes that are known to be important for trait change particularly changing environment an extended discussion of queller s paper can be found on brad s own website share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email print opens in new window print like loading filed under evolution tagged with environmental change natural selection population genetics price equation quantitative genetics trait change ecosystem restoration strengthens pollination network resilience and function april 10 2017 by lynsey83 leave a comment kaiser bunbury et al 2017 ecosystem restoration strengthens pollination network resilience and function nature 542 223 227 figure 1 from the paper the island of mahé with study sites and pollination networks for more details see the paper itself kat raines i chose this article as it merges my past and present research areas i currently work in radioecology focussing specifically on pollinators in chernobyl but previously i worked for three years in the seychelles archipelago on invasive species projects focussing on everything from plants to mammals i thought this paper looked interesting although slightly out of my research field and attempted to answer some of the big questions relating to ecosystem restoration in response to the removal of invasive species the aim of this paper by kaiser bunbury et al is to examine whether ecosystem restoration through the clearing of invasive plant species affects pollination networks this study was undertaken as a community field experiment on the island of mahé seychelles the seychelles archipelago is ideal to conduct invasive species projects as it is relatively isolated from other islands and main land africa and mahé offers mid altitude inselbergs as discrete sites from which 8 were selected for this study half the inselberg sites were cleared of invasive species and therefore referred to as restored and compared to sites that had not been restored they found that restoration markedly changed pollinator numbers behaviour performance and network structure the authors noted that the removal of dense thickets from the restored sites could have had an effect and we wondered exactly how much this would affect pollinator s ability to even see flowers and whether it was then appropriate comparing sites with dense vegetation to sites with a greater number of clear areas therefore increasing the visibility of flowers this study found that interactions in restored networks were more generalised and therefore indicate higher functional redundancy therefore making these networks more robust this concept was a main point in the discussion for the group as we debated whether it was better to have a high number of specialised pollinators or whether it was better to be more generalised and to what extent this matters on an isolated island with a high number of endemic species it has been shown that specialist species suffer from habitat loss the most and tend to go extinct first whereas more generalised species are more robust therefore increasing the ecosystem s resilience we also wondered if these findings could be extrapolated and applied to other regions and habitats as increased pollinator interaction is obviously a very important outcome for ecosystem restoration in conclusion we enjoyed the paper and were impressed with the amount of effort that went into data collection for the plant pollinator networks ecosystem restoration is a powerful tool in conservation but it is relatively unknown what the effects of restoration are on ecosystem functions so this paper is a notable addition to that knowledge base share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email print opens in new window print like loading filed under conservation ecology tagged with bees exotic generalism non native sexual segregation and flexible mating patterns in temperate bats april 10 2017 by lynsey83 leave a comment angell et al 2013 sexual segregation and flexible mating patterns in temperate bats plos one 8 1 e541...