Maternal and social effects on adaptation

进化是生物多样性的最终来源，并为生物体提供了应对持续环境变化的能力。我的研究小组研究自然界的短期进化变化，这些变化通常很小，而且经常是逆转的。然而，了解自然选择和进化中波动的环境原因可以告诉我们，这些微小的变化是如何累积起来产生我们现在看到的物种之间的进化差异的。******在接下来的五年里，我的实验室将把重点放在社会互动上，作为环境的一个方面，它可能对适应产生重要影响。社会互动在自然界中很常见（交配、养育、竞争），进化模型预测，这些互动会导致进化以意想不到的方式进行——甚至与我们预期的方向相反。然而，事实证明，这些预测很难在野外进行验证。在拟议的研究中，我们将使用三种物种（老鼠、红松鼠和一种入侵的浮游动物）来测试野外社会进化的几个方面。首先，我们将研究雌性鹿鼠是否会通过改变哺育行为来影响其后代的生存。其次，我们将测试入侵的浮游动物物种是否已经进化出能够在危险环境中更好地保护后代免受鱼类捕食的能力。最后，我们将揭示红松鼠特征的进化如何受到它们的邻居的影响。总之，这些研究将为社会互动对野外进化的重要性提供一些初步的测试。这项拟议中的研究将在进化生物学的前沿方法方面培养年轻科学家，推进我们对进化过程的基本理解，并为野生种群应对环境变化的能力提供有价值的见解。

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.