Microevolution by Natural Selection in Disturbed Tropical Habitats

该奖项将支持德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的Lawrence Gilbert教授与哥伦比亚波哥大第二植物园探险基金会的Mauricio Linares教授合作进行一项研究。研究人员打算研究人类对热带森林影响的进化后果。先前的一项研究表明，在过去的一个世纪里，在一个特定的蝴蝶种群中，多态形式的频率发生了巨大变化。据推测，这些变化是由人为干扰引起的。在拟议的工作中，研究人员将收集有关同一系统中最近进化变化的性质的额外证据，以及导致这些变化的选择压力。这些结果将产生关于当前自然选择在形态频率上的本质的假设。这些次要假设将通过比较野生蝴蝶的表型分布与野生蝴蝶后代的表型分布来验证，这些后代来自受干扰和未受干扰的栖息地。

This award will support Professor Lawrence Gilbert of the University of Texas at Austin in a research collaboration with Professor Mauricio Linares of the Fundacion Segunda Expedicion Botanica in Bogota, Colombia. The researchers intend to study the evolutionary consequences of human impact on tropical forests. In a previous study it was shown that the frequency of polymorphic forms in a particular butterfly population changed dramatically during the past century. It was hypothesized that these changes were caused by human perturbation. In the proposed work, the investigators will gather additional evidence about the nature of the recent evolutionary changes in the same system, and the selection pressures that have been responsible for these changes. The results will generate hypotheses about the nature of current natural selection on morph frequency. Such secondary hypotheses will be tested by comparing the distributions of phenotypes in the wild with their distributions among the offspring of wild- caught butterflies from disturbed and undisturbed habitats.