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

许多植物和动物在空间和时间上经历着可变的环境条件，它们可以通过改变它们的形状来做出反应，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见解，但我们对自然界中的“变形”物种知之甚少。了解植物和动物如何在不同的环境中进化改变其特征的能力不仅对生物学的基础研究很有意义，而且对现实世界的应用也很有意义，包括对农药耐受性的变化，淡水盐碱化，入侵物种，野生动物疾病，人类健康和气候变化。因此，这项研究的见解将通过进一步了解形态学的变化如何演变来提供社会效益。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和公共宣传工作（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演变。利用三十多年来对多种蝌蚪进行实验的发现，这些蝌蚪在不同的捕食者和竞争者环境中改变了形态，我计划将这项工作与近二十年来对密歇根州40个池塘和湿地进行长期调查的环境变化数据进行综合。本研究的主要目的有四：1）研究实验中观察到的形态变化是否也发生在自然界中; 2）确定自然湿地中每种蝌蚪的竞争和捕食变化是否不同，并与每种蝌蚪已知的形态变化有关; 3）调查不同种群如何随着时间的推移在竞争和捕食中经历不同数量的自然变化，以及4）预测捕食者和竞争者随着时间的推移对天然池塘中自然选择的反应，看看它是否与先前实验中的观察一致。整合这些详细和长期的数据集可以进行综合，以解决重要和新颖的研究问题，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，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.