Population Dynamics and the evolution of phenotypic plasticity: Experimental Adaptive Dynamics.

种群动态和表型可塑性的进化：实验适应性动态。

• 批准号: NE/C518214/2
• 负责人: Stewart Plaistow
• 金额: $ 6.05万
• 依托单位: University of Liverpool
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2007 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FC518214%2F2
• 关键词: Population; Dynamics; evolution; phenotypic; plasticity

The ability of an animal or plant to survive is dependent on their ability to deal with things like temperature, rainfall, predators and parasites. Some animals and plants are able to recognize changes in the habitat that they live in and change accordingly. These may include things like how active an animal is, how much they eat, how fast they grow, how many offspring they have, or even how they develop. For example, when water fleas grow up in a habitat in which fish are present they develop head and tail spines that make it harder for a fish to eat them, however these spines are not produced when fish are absent. This ability of an animal to change what they do depending upon their surroundings is called phenotypic plasticity. How plastic can an animal or plant be? In a perfect world, an organism that had unlimited plasticity could potentially live anywhere. However, this is not what we generally observe. The distribution of most plants and animals is constrained to some degree. Moreover, plants and animals that live in environments that don't change very much are generally less plastic. One reason for this could be that there are costs of being plastic as well as benefits. This work aims to examine what these costs of plasticity are. Before we can do this, we first have to define what a plastic animal is. This is not as easy as it sounds because in any animal some characteristics may be more plastic than others. For example, dragonflies that hatch late in the season reduce their body size (plastic) in order to always be able to develop as quickly as possible (not plastic). At present we have very little idea how plasticity in one characteristic is related to plasticity in others. This means that we have to measure the way that animals change many characteristics in different environments before we can compare the plasticity of one organism with another. In the first part of this project, I will compare the extent that different clones (individuals with identical genes) of a water flea change their feeding rate, growth, reproduction and survival in high and low food environments. This will enable me to (1) determine how plastic responses in different characteristics are related to each other, and (2) determine whether some clones show more overall plasticity (all characteristics) than others in response to a change in food availability. In the second part of the project, I will test the idea that being plastic is costly in some environments. Normally trying to measure how a particular characteristic of an organism influences its success in any environment is extremely difficult. The advantage of studying water fleas is that they reproduce so quickly (10 days) I can directly compete plastic and non-plastic clones against each other over many generations. In this way, the success of a particular clone in any environment can be measured as its ability to replace another clone. Using these sorts of population competition experiments I will examine whether plastic clones can replace non-plastic clones in a variable environment and whether non-plastic clones can replace plastic clones in a constant environment as would be expected if being plastic is costly.

动物或植物的生存能力取决于它们应对温度、降雨、捕食者和寄生虫等因素的能力。一些动物和植物能够识别它们生活的栖息地的变化，并相应地改变。这些可能包括动物的活跃程度，它们吃多少，它们生长的速度，它们有多少后代，甚至它们是如何发育的。例如，当水蚤在有鱼的栖息地生长时，它们会长出头部和尾部的刺，这使得鱼很难吃掉它们，但是当鱼不存在时，这些刺就不会产生。动物根据周围环境改变行为的能力被称为表型可塑性。一种动物或植物能有多大的可塑性？在一个完美的世界里，一个拥有无限可塑性的生物体可能生活在任何地方。然而，这不是我们通常观察到的。大多数植物和动物的分布在某种程度上受到限制。此外，生活在变化不大的环境中的植物和动物通常塑料较少。其中一个原因可能是塑料的成本和好处。这项工作的目的是研究这些成本的可塑性。在此之前，我们首先要定义什么是塑料动物。这并不像听起来那么容易，因为任何动物的某些特征可能比其他特征更具可塑性。例如，在季节后期孵化的蜻蜓会缩小它们的体型（塑料），以便总是能够尽快发育（而不是塑料）。目前，我们对一种特征的可塑性与其他特征的可塑性之间的关系知之甚少。这意味着我们必须测量动物在不同环境中改变许多特征的方式，然后才能比较一种生物与另一种生物的可塑性。在这个项目的第一部分，我将比较不同的水蚤克隆（具有相同基因的个体）在高和低食物环境中改变其摄食率，生长，繁殖和生存的程度。这将使我能够（1）确定不同特征的可塑性反应是如何相互关联的，以及（2）确定在食物供应的变化中，一些克隆是否比其他克隆表现出更大的整体可塑性（所有特征）。在这个项目的第二部分，我将测试在某些环境中塑料是昂贵的想法。通常，试图测量生物体的特定特征如何影响其在任何环境中的成功是极其困难的。研究水蚤的优势在于它们的繁殖速度如此之快（10天），我可以直接与塑料和非塑料克隆进行多代竞争。这样，在任何环境中，一个特定克隆的成功可以用它取代另一个克隆的能力来衡量。使用这些种类的种群竞争实验，我将研究塑料克隆是否可以在可变环境中取代非塑料克隆，以及非塑料克隆是否可以在恒定的环境中取代塑料克隆，如果塑料是昂贵的。