Abstract
With advancing global climate change, the analysis of thermal tolerance and evolutionary potential is important in explaining the ecological adaptation and changes in the distribution of invasive species. To reveal the variation of heat resistance and evolutionary potential in the invasive Mediterranean cryptic species of Bemisia tabaci, we selected two Chinese populations—one from Harbin, N China, and one from Turpan, S China—that experience substantial heat and cold stress and conducted knockdown tests under static high- and low-temperature conditions. ANOVAs indicated significant effects of populations and sex on heat knockdown time and chill coma recovery time. The narrow-sense heritability (h 2) estimates of heat tolerance based on a parental half-sibling breeding design ranged from 0.47±0.03 to 0.51±0.06, and the estimates of cold tolerance varied from 0.33±0.07 to 0.36±0.06. Additive genetic variances were significantly different from zero for both heat and cold tolerance. These results suggest that invasive B. tabaci Mediterranean cryptic species possesses a strong ability to respond to thermal selection and develops rapid resistance to climate change.
Highlights
The invasion of exotic species has accelerated along with the intensification of global climate change, the invasion of exotic species has accelerated
We compared the thermal tolerances of the Harbin and Turpan B. tabaci populations
The results indicated that genetic differences in thermal tolerance existed between the populations, with an increasing heat tolerance and a decreasing cold tolerance in the Turpan population compared with the Harbin population
Summary
The invasion of exotic species has accelerated along with the intensification of global climate change, the invasion of exotic species has accelerated. Biological invasion and global climate change have influenced selection pressures to various degrees and have even affected the evolutionary trajectories of organisms [3,4]. Thermal tolerance has received much attention because it provides insight into how climate shapes variations in the ecology, distribution, hereditary and evolution of species [10,11,12,13,14,15]. Determining thermal tolerance is an important first step in understanding the ways in which environmental variation affects fitness and, through changes in fitness, the dynamics of a given population. After an exotic species invades a new environment, new selection pressures may result in genetic variation within the species and may even result in the rapid adaptive evolution of tolerance traits [23,24,25]. Understanding the variations in heritability and evolvability in thermal tolerance can help predict a species’ future responses to climate change [5,27,28]
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