Maternal and social effects on adaptation

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Evolution is the ultimate source of biodiversity and provides organisms with the capacity to cope with persistent environmental change. My research group studies short-term evolutionary changes in nature, which are typically small and often reverse. Nevertheless, understanding the environmental causes of fluctuations in natural selection and evolution can tell us something about how these small changes might accumulate to produce the evolutionary differences that we now see between species.******Over the next five years my lab will focus on social interactions as one aspect of the environment that could have important impacts on adaptation. Social interactions are common in nature (mating, mothering, competition) and evolutionary models predict that these interactions can cause evolution to proceed in unexpected ways - even in the opposite direction to what we would otherwise expect. These predictions, however, have proven very difficult to test in the wild. In the proposed research, we will use three species (mice, red squirrels and an invasive zooplankton) to test several aspects of social evolution in the wild. First we will investigate whether female deer mice can affect the survival of their offspring by changing their nursing behaviour. Second, we will test whether an invasive zooplankton species has evolved the ability to produce offspring that are better protected against fish predation in risky environments. Finally, we will uncover how the evolution of red squirrel features is affected by their neighbours. Together these studies will provide some of the first tests of the importance of social interactions to evolution in the wild. This proposed research will train young scientists in cutting-edge approaches to evolutionary biology, advance our fundamental understanding of the evolutionary process, and provide valuable insights into the capacity for wild populations to cope with environmental changes.