Guppies Offer Insights into Interface of Evolution and Ecology
Contact: Michael Kinnison (207) 581-2575; David Munson (207) 581-3777
ORONO, Maine – UMaine researcher Michael Kinnison will be bringing his considerable expertise in population and evolutionary biology to a five-year, $5 million project aimed at defining the real-time relationships between evolution and ecology in the wild streams of Trinidad’s jungle.
One of just three projects funded by the National Science Foundation’s Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research program this season, this project brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from across North America under the leadership of UC Riverside’s David Reznick. Playing a key role in the overall project, Kinnison and his team will utilize UMaine’s portion of the grant, approximately $500,000, to study month-to-month trait evolution in populations of a small stream fish, the Trinidadian guppy, using DNA and pedigree assignment approaches. Dr. Kinnison’s lab is known for research into evolution that occurs in our own lifetimes, particularly in fishes in Maine and around the world.
Experts in evolutionary biology, molecular biology, population ecology, community ecology, biogeochemistry, ecosystem science and applied math will work together on the project as they attempt to determine how ecology and evolution interact. By examining both how populations of Trinidadian guppies adapt to new environments and how other populations of fish and other organisms react to those adaptations, the team hopes to provide insights into how the evolution of a population can influence other processes in the stream environment, ranging from the co-evolution of other fish populations to nutrient cycling.
“In the past, evolution was perceived as being vanishingly slow, taking thousands to millions of years, whereas the ecological processes that regulate populations and communities were considered to occur over much shorter time scales” said Kinnison. “But when we focus on how populations evolve using modern statistical tools we see that evolution is often observable in just one or a few generations. This project attempts to explain not only how ecological factors can cause a population to evolve, but also how those changes in a population can reciprocally affect the other organisms in the environment and ecological processes.”
The interface between ecology and contemporary evolution is a rapidly area expanding for researchers, one that Kinnison hopes will provide a new level of synthesis and understanding of natural systems.
“One of the most exciting parts of this project is that it allows us to work on something that is much larger than most labs would be able to tackle on their own. Our hope is that we will be able to better understand how evolution and ecology interact in nature, adding another level of predictability to how natural systems behave,” said Kinnison. “It could add an important new tool to the tool box of ecologists and conservation biologists.”