The successful invasion of the European earwig across North America reflects adaptations to thermal regimes but not mean temperatures
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Abstract
Understanding the mechanisms by which an introduced species adapt to newly encountered habitats is a major question in ecology. A key method to address this question is to collect data on introduced species that have successfully invaded a broad diversity of novel environments, and analyze how their life-history traits changed with these new constraints. Here, we present and analyze such a unique data set in the European earwig Forficula auricularia L, an insect that invaded North America during the last century. We conducted a common garden experiment, in which we measured 13 life-history traits in 4158 individuals from 19 populations across North America. Our results demonstrate that the successful invasion of this species came with changes in 10 of their life-history traits in response to thermal regimes (winter-summer and autumn-spring temperatures), but with no change in response to the overall mean temperatures of the invaded locations. Importantly, we show that some of these changes are by-products of novel thermal regimes, whereas others reflect adaptive strategies of females to these constraints. Overall, our findings reveal the importance of thermal regimes over mean temperatures in climate adaptation, and emphasize that studying adaptive capabilities is crucial to predict the limits of biological invasions.
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Climate change is impacting eco-systems worldwide and driving many populations to move, adapt or go extinct. It is increasingly appreciated, for example, that species may adjust their phenology in response to climate change, although empirical data is scarce. In this preprint [1], Tourneur and Meunier report an impressive sampling effort in which life-history traits were measured across introduced populations of earwig in North America. The authors examine whether variation in life-history across populations is correlated with aspects of the thermal climate experienced by each population: mean temperature and seasonality of temperature. They find some fascinating correlations between life-history and thermal climate; correlations with the seasonality of temperature, but not with mean temperature. This study provides relatively …
Climate change is impacting eco-systems worldwide and driving many populations to move, adapt or go extinct. It is increasingly appreciated, for example, that species may adjust their phenology in response to climate change, although empirical data is scarce. In this preprint [1], Tourneur and Meunier report an impressive sampling effort in which life-history traits were measured across introduced populations of earwig in North America. The authors examine whether variation in life-history across populations is correlated with aspects of the thermal climate experienced by each population: mean temperature and seasonality of temperature. They find some fascinating correlations between life-history and thermal climate; correlations with the seasonality of temperature, but not with mean temperature. This study provides relatively uncommon data, in the sense that where most of the literature looking at adaptation in animals in response to climate change has focused on physiological traits [2, 3], this study examines changes in life-history traits with time scales relevant to impending climate change, and provides a reasonable argument that this is adaptation, not just constraint.
References
[1] Tourneur, J.-C. and Meunier, J. (2019). Thermal regimes, but not mean temperatures, drive patterns of rapid climate adaptation at a continent-scale: evidence from the introduced European earwig across North America. BioRxiv, 550319, ver. 4 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Evolutionary Biology. doi: 10.1101/550319
[2] Kellermann, V., Overgaard, J., Hoffmann, A. A., Fløjgaard, C., Svenning, J. C., & Loeschcke, V. (2012). Upper thermal limits of Drosophila are linked to species distributions and strongly constrained phylogenetically. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(40), 16228-16233. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1207553109
[3] Hoffmann, A. A., & Sgro, C. M. (2011). Climate change and evolutionary adaptation. Nature, 470(7335), 479. doi: 10.1038/nature09670 -
