Rapid adaptation to temperature change… and its limits

People often think of evolution as though natural selection were sitting around waiting for new mutations to promote or cull. But it’s not really like that. A great deal of variation exists in any population, much of which has little or no effect on the survival or reproductive success of individuals carrying that variation. However, a changing environment can alter all that.

Barrett et. al. (2010) were interested in how population of three-spine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) would respond to lower temperature extremes. They collected a sample of sticklebacks from both marine lagoons and freshwater lakes in British Columbia, Canada. First, they acclimated the fish to living in fresh water, as well at a consistent temperature and daylight length.

Lakes are far more variable in temperature than the oceans – they are warmer in summer and cooler in the winter – due to the smaller quantity of water which needs to gain or lose heat. Rather unsurprisingly, the researchers found that the lake-dwelling sticklebacks could tolerate significantly colder temperatures than their marine counterparts (both populations could tolerate much higher temperatures than they ever encountered in the environment). They also demonstrated that the degree of tolerance for cold extremes was heritable – even raised in the same environment, the offspring of lake-dwelling fish could tolerate lower temperatures, whereas marine sticklebacks could not (and hybrids were intermediate).

The interesting part, however, was when they got to raising populations of sticklebacks with marine ancestors in ponds, which could get even colder in the winter than the freshwater lakes. In just three generations (three years), the population evolved to tolerate temperatures 2.5°C colder than their marine forebears! This wouldn’t have been a new mutation – existing genes, already present (but perhaps rare) had become far more common in the population than they had previously been.

It wasn’t all good news for the sticklebacks, though. Genetic diversity is critical to maintaining populations, and a period of such strong natural selection will dramatically reduce a population’s diversity. Even if a population can adapt to one sudden shock, it may so deplete their genetic diversity that there won’t be any convenient alternative genes in the population when the next hit comes.

The next year brought the coldest winter that part of Canada had seen for several decades, and despite all their adaptations, all three of the experimental populations were wiped out. It may be that it was just too cold, or perhaps the increased ice cover on the ponds reduced the oxygen levels in the water to below what the fish needed. Either way, it’s a grim prospect for conservation biologists if a population that seems, by all accounts, to be surviving and even adapting to the changes in its environment can suddenly hit an unpassable barrier and go extinct.

Sticklebacks have a history of being able to adapt to significantly changing temperatures over the last few millennia, and so they may have had an advantage in having genes for dealing with a changing climate already present in their populations. That may not be the case for all species, and this study has shown just how drastic effect a change in temperature extremes can have on populations.

References

Barrett, R., Paccard, A., Healy, T., Bergek, S., Schulte, P., Schluter, D., & Rogers, S. (2010). Rapid evolution of cold tolerance in stickleback Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0923

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