Abstract
Many natural populations are likely to be impacted by increasing temperatures resulting from climate change. The selection pressures exerted by these impacts may allow some populations to adapt to the elevated temperatures – which could reduce climate change’s impact. At present, there is limited evidence for such “evolutionary rescue”. Moreover, the potential for adaptation may be reduced if populations have experienced population bottlenecks as an initial consequence of climate change or due to other human impacts. This study looked at the response to selection in laboratory populations subjected to selection for heat tolerance, in both normal and bottlenecked laboratory populations of the least killifish Heterandria formosa. The bottlenecked populations had undergone a single bottleneck and were found to have fewer microsatellite alleles and reduced genetic diversity. After four generations of selection, heat tolerance had increased – albeit by only 0.1 °C. The increased heat tolerance was more pronounced for normal populations than it was for those that had undergone a population bottleneck. These results show that some populations, under specific conditions, may be able to adapt to elevated water temperatures. However, this response may be too slow for species with a long generation time and further limited in populations that have undergone drastic reductions in population size. In addition, the observed potential for adaptation to physiological heat stress does not equate to evolutionary rescue from other stresses associated with climate change.
Highlights
Climate change is resulting in higher temperatures; combined land and ocean temperatures increased by about 0.85◦C over the period 1880–2012 (IPCC, 2014)
The single but severe bottleneck used in the present study resulted in a loss of genetic variation for a set of microsatellite markers
Bottlenecked populations had 3–6 alleles at the seven loci analyzed the maximum in populations founded with two fish is 4 alleles. This shows that replacing males shortly after the start of the bottlenecked populations caused the actual number of founders to be three rather than two
Summary
Climate change is resulting in higher temperatures; combined land and ocean temperatures increased by about 0.85◦C over the period 1880–2012 (IPCC, 2014). Water temperature has many direct and indirect effects on aquatic organisms, including those resulting from physiological heat stress, changes in ice cover, water. A variety of effects have been noted for fishes in inland waters (as reviewed in Jeppesen et al, 2012; Comte et al, 2013; Dokulil, 2013; Lynch et al, 2016), including changes in species distributions and in species composition. While fish species extinctions to date seem mostly due to climate change having affected habitat and food availability (Cahill et al, 2013), increased temperature appears to have resulted in extinctions (Beever et al, 2010; Sinervo et al, 2010; Cahill et al, 2013)
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