OPUS: Synthesizing three decades of tadpole plasticity experiments with two decades of wetland surveys

许多动植物在空间和时间上经历了不同的环境条件，它们可以通过改变自己的形状来做出反应，使它们更适合当前的环境。几十年的实验为植物和动物如何改变形状提供了巨大的洞察力，但我们对自然界中“变形”物种的了解要少得多。了解植物和动物如何在不同的环境中进化出改变其特征的能力不仅对生物学的基础研究感兴趣，而且对现实世界的应用也很感兴趣，包括改变对杀虫剂、淡水盐碱化、入侵物种、野生动物疾病、人类健康和气候变化的耐受性。因此，这项研究的洞察力将通过加深我们对形态变化如何演变的理解来提供社会效益。这项工作将培训3名本科生，涉及暑期高中和中学教师，以及K-12和公共宣传努力(包括服务不足的学校)。该项目将综合自然环境的长期数据，以更好地了解环境变化如何影响物种特征的未来进化。利用三十多年来对多种蝌蚪进行的实验的发现，这些发现会改变它们在不同捕食者和竞争对手环境中的形态，我计划将这些发现与密歇根州40个池塘和湿地的长期调查中近20年的环境变化数据结合起来。该建议有四个主要目标：1)检查在我们的实验中观察到的形态变化是否也发生在自然界；2)确定自然湿地中竞争和捕食的变化是否因每种蝌蚪物种的不同而不同，并与每一物种的已知形态变化有关；3)调查不同种群如何经历不同数量的自然竞争和捕食随着时间的推移，以及4)预测捕食者和竞争对手随着时间的推移对自然池中捕食者和竞争对手的自然选择的反应，看看它是否与先前实验中的观察结果一致。整合这些详细和长期的数据集可以进行综合，解决重要的和新的研究问题，从而为当前和未来的研究人员增加价值和新的见解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many plants and animals experience variable environmental conditions over space and time and they can respond by changing their shape in ways that make them better suited to their current environment. Decades of experiments have provided tremendous insights into how plants and animal change shape, but we know much less about “shape-shifting” species in nature. Understanding how plants and animals evolve the ability to change their traits in different environments is of interest not only to foundational research in biology, but also to real-world applications, including changes in tolerance to pesticides, freshwater salinization, invasive species, wildlife diseases, human health, and climate change. Thus, the insights from this research will provide societal benefits by furthering our understanding of how changes in morphology can evolve. The work will train 3 undergraduate students, involve summer high school and middle school teachers, and K-12 and public outreach efforts (including with underserved schools). This project will synthesize long-term data on natural environments to better understand how environmental variation impacts the future evolution of species traits. Using discoveries from over three decades of experiments on multiple species of tadpoles, which alter their morphology in different predator and competitor environments, I plan to synthesize that work with nearly two decades of data on environmental variation from long-term surveys of 40 ponds and wetlands in Michigan. The proposal has four major objectives: 1) examine whether the morphological changes observed in our experiments also occur in nature; 2) determine if variation in competition and predation in natural wetlands differs for each tadpole species and is associated with known morphological changes of each species; 3) investigate how different populations experience different amounts of natural variation in competition and predation over time, and 4) predict responses to natural selection in natural ponds by predators and competitors over time to see if it aligns with observations in prior experiments. Integrating these detailed and long-term datasets allows a synthesis that will address important and novel research questions, thereby adding value and new insights for current and future investigators.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.