Abstract
Evidence of contemporary evolution across ecological time scales stimulated research on the eco‐evolutionary dynamics of natural populations. Aquatic systems provide a good setting to study eco‐evolutionary dynamics owing to a wealth of long‐term monitoring data and the detected trends in fish life‐history traits across intensively harvested marine and freshwater systems. In the present study, we focus on modelling approaches to simulate eco‐evolutionary dynamics of fishes and their ecosystems. Firstly, we review the development of modelling from single species to multispecies approaches. Secondly, we advance the current state‐of‐the‐art methodology by implementing evolution of life‐history traits of a top predator into the context of complex food web dynamics as described by the allometric trophic network (ATN) framework. The functioning of our newly developed eco‐evolutionary ATNE framework is illustrated using a well‐studied lake food web. Our simulations show how both natural selection arising from feeding interactions and size‐selective fishing cause evolutionary changes in the top predator and how those feed back to its prey species and further cascade down to lower trophic levels. Finally, we discuss future directions, particularly the need to integrate genomic discoveries into eco‐evolutionary projections.
Highlights
The study of eco-evolutionary dynamics has become a prominent field in the contemporary biology research (Hendry, 2017)
The field and its current terminology was largely catalysed by the realization that evolution occurs more rapidly when viewed across contemporary time scales (Hendry & Kinnison, 1999), yet its roots stem from the earlier studies looking into the role of trait evolution on species interactions such as consumer–resource and host– parasite dynamics (Abrams & Matsuda, 1997; Pimentel, 1961; Pimentel & Al-Hafidh, 1965; van Valen, 1973)
We focus on modelling attempts to investigate and predict eco-evolutionary dynamics in aquatic systems with a particular focus on fishing as the key driver [for a review on experimental approaches on eco-evolutionary dynamics in aquatic systems, see, for example De Meester and Pantelj (2014)]
Summary
The study of eco-evolutionary dynamics has become a prominent field in the contemporary biology research (Hendry, 2017). The eco-evolutionary dynamics resulting from this trait architecture dramatically differ from those predicted by traditional quantitative genetics: while the latter leads to directional phenotypic change and a reduction in phenotypic diversity, the former causes disruptive and divergent evolution that further feeds back to increased stochasticity in the intrinsic per capita population growth (Kuparinen & Hutchings, 2017).
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