Evolutionary Responses to Conditionality in Species Interactions across Environmental Gradients

Dec 1, 2018

This Zenodo record is a permanently preserved version of a PREreview. You can view the complete PREreview at https://prereview.org/reviews/7728004.

BIGC - PREreview of "Evolutionary responses to conditionality in species interactions across environmental gradients"

This is a preprint journal club review of "Evolutionary responses to conditionality in species interactions across environmental gradients" by Anna M O'Brien, Ruairidh J.H. Sawers, Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, Sharon Y Strauss. The preprint was originally posted on bioRxiv on December 10, 2017 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/031195) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/10/031195.

Our group Biotic Interactions and Global Change (BIGC) reviewed this paper on January, 2017 .

Overview and take-home messages:

We selected this paper for lab-meeting because we are interested in the conditionality of interactions. In a nutshell, conditionality means that the effect of an interaction is not fixed, but conditional on other parameters, like environmental conditions. This concept can be called "context dependency" or "higher order effects" depending on the literature you read.

This manuscript first summarises how often the mutualistic or antagonistic effect of species interactions on fitness is conditional to environmental stress levels. Second, it describes theoretically how conditionality on species interactions can promote evolutionary adaptations or co-adaptations. Finally, it shows an experimental design that can be used to test.

Positive feed-back:

The paper was perfect to stimulate discussion in the group, as it proposes a clear evolutionary mechanism that is often ignored in the literature. The idea to link conditionality to evolutionary outcomes is very interesting and the theoretical and empirical proposed tests make it a very comprehensive paper.

Major concerns:

Our only major concern is about the generality of this mechanisms. This does not undermine the importance of describing a mechanism that can occur under some situations, but was unclear to us how rare can be events of evolutionary adaptations due to conditionality on interactions.

Minor concerns:

Maybe we are not specialists in the topic but we all agree that the paper was trying to cover a lot of ground. Maybe focusing only on mutualisms, and providing more specific examples of interactions, stress gradients, and characters under selection would help the reader to focus through the paper.

Other thoughts:

- The empirical test suggested is trying to catch evolution in the act and won't work on species already speciated through this mechanisms. A macroecological approach may be complementary trying to identify within groups if species adapted to high stress also invest more in mutualists (higher number of partners) and species adapted to low-stress environments establish fewer interactions.

- It is not clear how important can be the selection pressure due to conditionality as compared to the myriad of factors (starting with the main effects of stress) affecting a given species. Or in other words, from the simultaneous selection pressures of mutualists, herbivores, competitors, abiotic stressors, the species has, which is the relevance of a single selection pressure.

Biotic Interactions and Global Change (BIGC) - O. Godoy and I. Bartomeus groups.

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Evolutionary Responses to Conditionality in Species Interactions across Environmental Gradients

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