The effects of thermal deterioration on the life history traits of Daphnia magna

Adverse anthropogenic impacts on the Biosphere have produced environmental change at a rate unprecedented in the Cenozoic, shifting the environmental conditions outside of the physiological tolerance range of many species. Predicting the patterns of species’ response to climate change requires tracking the variation in fitness-related traits (i.e. life histories) during exposure to thermally changing environments, because these traits may strongly correlate with the probability of survival.

A growing body of experimental studies demonstrated that an increase of mean temperatures significantly influences the response of several life history traits, namely reduction of development time and body size at maturation. However, there are still significant gaps in our understanding of how species respond to temperature change, as most research has focused only on abrupt changes to thermal conditions. To better reflect ecological reality, we need experimental designs that examine the effects of gradually and continuously changing thermal environments over longer time scales, because the population genetics of adaptation to stressful environments is strongly influenced by the rate of environmental change. Moreover, the extent to which these trait changes result from phenotypic plasticity versus genetic adaptation remains poorly understood.

To address these gaps, we conducted a controlled multigenerational evolutionary experiment with a plankton crustacean, Daphnia magna. We subjected the clonal populations to gradually increasing temperatures, a scenario more representative of ongoing climate change than abrupt thermal shifts. We monitored their lifespan, fecundity, somatic growth rate, age at maturation, body size, and extinction risk across generations, and used a reciprocal transplant experiment to disentangle genetic adaptation from phenotypic plasticity.

Our results revealed the two distinctive patterns of the response in life history traits under elevated temperatures. The adaptive response was manifested through an increase in fecundity of high-temperature populations relative to control populations. We interpret reduction in both their development time and mean adult body size as the maladaptive responses, given the positive correlations found between adult body size and fecundity, and between development time and adult body size.

However, we detected significant level of adaptive plasticity in our populations, as some clonal lines exhibited a markedly different response to elevated temperatures, opposite the population-level trend (increased development time under high temperature, leading to larger adult size and ultimately higher fecundity). This suggests a strong genotype-by-environment interaction (G X E), where genetic variation shapes the plastic response to environmental stress. The presence of such adaptive variants amidst a generally maladaptive mean response underscores the importance of intra-population variation in plasticity. This highlights the need to consider not only average plastic responses but also the distribution and evolutionary potential of genotype-specific trajectories in the face of climate change.