Abstract
It is increasingly recognized that evolution may occur in ecological time. It is not clear, however, how fast evolution - or phenotypic change more generally - may be in comparison with the associated ecology, or whether systems with fast ecological dynamics generally have relatively fast rates of phenotypic change. We developed a new dataset on standardized rates of change in population size and phenotypic traits for a wide range of species and taxonomic groups. We show that rates of change in phenotypes are generally no more than 2/3, and on average about 1/4, the concurrent rates of change in population size. There was no relationship between rates of population change and rates of phenotypic change across systems. We also found that the variance of both phenotypic and ecological rates increased with the mean across studies following a power law with an exponent of two, while temporal variation in phenotypic rates was lower than in ecological rates. Our results are consistent with the view that ecology and evolution may occur at similar time scales, but clarify that only rarely do populations change as fast in traits as they do in abundance.
Highlights
Understanding the pace of evolutionary change is a major objective in biology (Simpson 1944; Eldredge and Gould 1972; Kinnison and Hendry 2001)
Because evolution is a population-level process, we focus here on changes in mean traits along with changes in population size, evolution may be linked to other ecological processes such as metapopulation dynamics or ecosystem function (Hanski 2011; Walsh et al 2012)
Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Summary
Understanding the pace of evolutionary change is a major objective in biology (Simpson 1944; Eldredge and Gould 1972; Kinnison and Hendry 2001). A core proposition of the burgeoning field of eco-evolutionary dynamics is that evolutionary change is fast enough that the resulting changes in phenotype can feed back to ecological dynamics as they unfold (Thompson 1998; Yoshida et al 2003; Fussmann et al 2007; Palkovacs and Hendry 2010; Schoener 2011; Reznick 2013). Evolution may alter parameter space and generate changes in dynamic patterns that are unpredictable from standard population models (Roughgarden 1971; Fussmann et al 2003; Yoshida et al 2003; Otto and Day 2007). To investigate the link between rates of population and evolutionary change, we begin by modifying a standard model describing the rate of directional change in the mean of trait z: dz dt 1⁄4
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