Abstract
Organisms commonly experience significant spatiotemporal variation in their environments. In response to such heterogeneity, different mechanisms may act that enhance ecological performance locally. However, depending on the nature of the mechanism involved, the consequences for populations may differ greatly. Building on a previous model that investigated the conditions under which different adaptive mechanisms (co)evolve, this study compares the ecological and evolutionary population consequences of three very different responses to environmental heterogeneity: matching habitat choice (directed gene flow), adaptive plasticity (associated with random gene flow), and divergent natural selection. Using individual‐based simulations, we show that matching habitat choice can have a greater adaptive potential than plasticity or natural selection: it allows for local adaptation while protecting genetic polymorphism despite global mating or strong environmental changes. Our simulations further reveal that increasing environmental fluctuations and unpredictability generally favor the emergence of specialist genotypes but that matching habitat choice is better at preventing local maladaptation by individuals. This confirms that matching habitat choice can speed up the genetic divergence among populations, cause indirect assortative mating via spatial clustering, and hence even facilitate sympatric speciation. This study highlights the potential importance of directed dispersal in local adaptation and speciation, stresses the difficulty of deriving its operation from nonexperimental observational data alone, and helps define a set of ecological conditions which should favor its emergence and subsequent detection in nature.
Highlights
Organisms commonly experience significant spatiotemporal variation in their physical or social environment
We modeled our three main mechanisms to cope with environmental change by combining different values for the inherited dispersal and plasticity traits such that these would create the desired scenario
It emphasizes that adaptive directed gene flow as due to matching habitat choice can be as powerful in leading to increase in local adaptation, genetic variation, population genetic structure, and reproductive isolation, compared to more “classical” mechanisms like natural selection and plasticity
Summary
Organisms commonly experience significant spatiotemporal variation in their physical or social environment. Different mechanisms may act that enable organisms to cope with such environmental heterogeneity. We focus on three very distinct routes toward increased local performance: phenotypic plasticity (Schlichting & Pigliucci, 1998), divergent natural selection (Schluter, 2001), and matching habitat choice (Edelaar, Siepielski, & Clobert, 2008). These mechanisms can each lead to improved performance but their ecological and evolutionary impacts can differ greatly. We hope to attract further research attention to the overlooked phenomenon of matching habitat choice in view of its potential evolutionary and ecological impacts
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