Skip to content
Hindi News, हिंदी समाचार, Samachar, Breaking News, Latest Khabar – Pratirodh

Hindi News, हिंदी समाचार, Samachar, Breaking News, Latest Khabar – Pratirodh

Primary Menu Hindi News, हिंदी समाचार, Samachar, Breaking News, Latest Khabar – Pratirodh

Hindi News, हिंदी समाचार, Samachar, Breaking News, Latest Khabar – Pratirodh

  • Home
  • Newswires
  • Politics & Society
  • The New Feudals
  • World View
  • Arts And Aesthetics
  • For The Record
  • About Us
  • Featured

Knowing Rapid Evolution Has Limits Can Help With Conservation

Jun 1, 2022 | Pratirodh Bureau

FILE PHOTO: Protesters are seen at the March for Climate Justice in Kolkata (Image: Pacific Press Media Production Corp/Alamy)

Human impacts on global ecosystems can be severe, widespread and irreversible. But life on Earth has evolved to meet environmental challenges for 3.5 billion years: Could these same evolutionary forces help life on Earth persist in human-altered environments?

Our latest research finds that evolution seems unstoppable during a biological invasion, but then suddenly stalls after a century of rapid adaptation. Understanding why this happens could be key to managing biodiversity over the next century.

In the face of environmental challenges, natural selection can be a potent force for evolutionary change on contemporary timescales. Galapagos finches evolve different beak sizes to feed on changing seed sources, over-harvested cod are maturing earlier and purple loosestrife plants flower earlier in response to shorter growing seasons in northern Ontario, Canada. But evolution has limits.

Evolutionary Constraints

For almost 20 years, I’ve studied how some species invade and thrive in new environments. At Queen’s University, I continue to work with students and collaborators to study rapid evolution in nature.

An emerging theme of this work is the interplay between natural selection and evolutionary constraint.

Adaptation to new environments requires new genetic variants. Natural selection can promote genes that improve survival and reproduction. But without new variants, adaptive evolution will stall.

Constraints are the reason related species share common traits, and the reason centaurs, mermaids and dragons exist only in mythology: no genes produce hooves or fish tails in humans, nor wings in large reptiles. By limiting the options available to natural selection, evolutionary constraints are the ultimate cause of extinction.

As a counterweight to natural selection, it’s surprising that evolutionary constraints aren’t studied as intensively. But there are experimental tools for this.

Common Garden Studies

The common garden experiment was introduced 100 years ago yet it remains the gold standard to study the genetic basis of rapid evolution.

It involves growing genetically related individuals in a uniform environment to observe genetic differences in growth and development. In our lab, common garden experiments with purple loosestrife reveal a delicate dance between natural selection and evolutionary constraint.

Purple loosestrife, or Lythrum salicaria, is known for its attractive purple-pink flowers in invaded wetlands across Canada and the United States. Over the span of 150 years, this one species spread from Maryland, US to as far north as Labrador and Saskatchewan (Canada), and south to the Gulf of Mexico and southern California.

Purple loosestrife, like other plants, has finite resources to invest in growth or reproduction. Some genes produce larger plants, others make plants that flower earlier. But no genes do both. This represents a genetic constraint to flower earlier or grow bigger to collect more resources.

Plants with more resources are more competitive and can produce more flowers. But extra resources are wasted if flowers are produced too late in the season, when temperatures are too cold for pollinators and seed development to ensure the passing of genes for larger growth. This delicate balance yields an optimal flowering time that tracks changes in the length of the growing season.

Rapid Spread

So how did natural selection and evolutionary constraint shape flowering time of purple loosestrife as it spread across North America? We can’t travel back in time, but natural history collections provide a tangible connection with the past.

Dried specimens of purple loosestrife are stored in the Fowler Herbarium at Queen’s University, and in dozens of other herbarium collections across North America. Recorded with each carefully preserved specimen is the location and date of collection.

Using historical weather records, we reconstructed the local growing conditions of each specimen to computationally predict what each plant would look like if it were grown under uniform growing conditions in a virtual common garden.

No longer constrained by viable seed collections, we would use the virtual common garden to reconstruct 150 years of evolution across North America.

The results are striking. Earlier flowering repeatedly evolves in response to shorter growing seasons across North America. But after about a century, the rate of evolution seems to stall, constrained by a trade-off between flowering time and size. This kind of evolutionary stasis is also observed in the fossil record over much longer timescales. It seems to be a common feature of evolution.

Constraints are a good reason to be skeptical that evolution will save species from extinction in stressful environments. But constraints also make evolution more predictable, at least on the shorter timescales most relevant to human civilisation.

And this is just the beginning of a single species among millions. How does the balance between natural selection and constraint play out in other invasive species, or in species facing extinction? Natural history collections help us understand the past, to make predictions about our future. It’s time they get the attention they deserve.

(Republished under Creative Commons from The Conversation: By Robert I Colautti, Queen’s University, Ontario) 

Tags: environment, global ecosystems, natural selection, Pratirodh

Continue Reading

Previous Attacks Can’t Suppress Farmers’ Voices: Tikait
Next Terrorists Gun Down Teacher In J&K’s Kulgam

More Stories

  • Featured

Kashmir’s Nourishing Karewas Crumble Under Infrastructure Burden

15 hours ago Shalini
  • Featured

Sprawling Kolkata Faced With A Tall Order For A Sustainable Future

17 hours ago Pratirodh Bureau
  • Featured

Indian Economy Yet To Revive From Effects Of Pandemic: CPI (M)

24 hours ago Pratirodh Bureau

Recent Posts

  • Kashmir’s Nourishing Karewas Crumble Under Infrastructure Burden
  • Sprawling Kolkata Faced With A Tall Order For A Sustainable Future
  • Indian Economy Yet To Revive From Effects Of Pandemic: CPI (M)
  • New Pipelines Will Fragment Assam’s Protected Forests: Environmentalists
  • The Role Of Urban Foraging In Building Climate-Resilient Food Systems
  • Now, A ‘Private’ Sainik School Linked To RSS?
  • About 3,000 Tech Employees Being Fired A Day On Average In Jan
  • War Veteran Doctor, ‘Rasna’ Creator Are Among Padma Awardees
  • Black Days Ahead If Coal City Doesn’t Change
  • US Firm Alleges ‘Brazen’ Fraud By Adani, Who Calls It Malicious
  • Why Ukraine War Today Is So Different From A Year Ago
  • No Screening Of BBC Docu At JNU As Power, Internet Cut
  • Shielding The Hijol From Climate Impacts
  • Bilkis Bano’s Plea Against Convicts’ Remission Could Not Be Heard In SC
  • NDRF To Station Permanent Teams In Hills For Rescue Operations
  • Thousands Of Indian IT Professionals Jobless In The US
  • How Solar-Powered Refrigerators Slow Down Climate Change
  • Compensation For Crop Loss: Landless, Tenant Farmers Miss Out
  • Peru Closes Machu Picchu As Anti-Government Protests Grow
  • There Was No Need To Scrap Article 370: Dulat

Search

Main Links

  • Home
  • Newswires
  • Politics & Society
  • The New Feudals
  • World View
  • Arts And Aesthetics
  • For The Record
  • About Us

Related Stroy

  • Featured

Kashmir’s Nourishing Karewas Crumble Under Infrastructure Burden

15 hours ago Shalini
  • Featured

Sprawling Kolkata Faced With A Tall Order For A Sustainable Future

17 hours ago Pratirodh Bureau
  • Featured

Indian Economy Yet To Revive From Effects Of Pandemic: CPI (M)

24 hours ago Pratirodh Bureau
  • Featured

New Pipelines Will Fragment Assam’s Protected Forests: Environmentalists

1 day ago Pratirodh Bureau
  • Featured

The Role Of Urban Foraging In Building Climate-Resilient Food Systems

2 days ago Pratirodh Bureau

Recent Posts

  • Kashmir’s Nourishing Karewas Crumble Under Infrastructure Burden
  • Sprawling Kolkata Faced With A Tall Order For A Sustainable Future
  • Indian Economy Yet To Revive From Effects Of Pandemic: CPI (M)
  • New Pipelines Will Fragment Assam’s Protected Forests: Environmentalists
  • The Role Of Urban Foraging In Building Climate-Resilient Food Systems
Copyright © All rights reserved. | CoverNews by AF themes.