Understandings of
relations between communities/organisms and climate change commonly
miss a linkage between the genotype and the phenotype. Luisa Orsini
today discussed the effects of environmental changes on natural
populations and communities, by gauging ecological genetic drift.
Using Daphnia (water flea) as a keystone species from freshwater
ecosystems, she measured the response to both natural and
anthropogenic changes of 166 individual marker genomes and at the
phenotypic level, over extended generations. This was possible
because Daphnia have a short generation time and parthenogenetic
reproduction, meaning cloned females are produced during favourable
external conditions and sexually produced “resting phase” eggs in
times of environmental stress. These resting phase eggs give the
ability to look back into the Daphnia's 'genetic timeline'.
She produced
repeatable patterns of adaptations of the genome from spatially
separate communities, using stresses of an anthropogenic nature,
predation and parasitism, as well as temperature changes.
What I found most
interesting is that this has an applicability for understanding the
influence of genetic changes at a community level, while perhaps not
directly to all other species, but for understanding the
evolutionary and ecological changes behind a community under the
combined weight of climate and anthropogenic change. This will
hopefully be the cause for further research in this groundbreaking
area.
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| Lake Genval, Belgium (photo credit: http://wikimapia.org/1498100/Genval-Lake) |
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