Inferring microevolution from museum collections and resampling: lessons learned from Cepaea

PeerJ

article

Małgorzata Ożgo¹  Thor-Seng Liew²  Nicole B. Webster³  Menno Schilthuizen² 

[1] Department of Evolutionary Biology, Kazimierz Wielki University;Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sabah;Institute Biology Leiden, Leiden University;Endless Forms Group, Naturalis Biodiversity Center

关键词: HIREC;    Snails;    Natural selection;    Natural history collections;    Colour polymorphism;    Time series;    Evolutionary trends;    Population genetics;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.3938

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

Natural history collections are an important and largely untapped source of long-term data on evolutionary changes in wild populations. Here, we utilize three large geo-referenced sets of samples of the common European land-snail Cepaea nemoralis stored in the collection of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Resampling of these populations allowed us to gain insight into changes occurring over 95, 69, and 50 years. Cepaea nemoralis is polymorphic for the colour and banding of the shell; the mode of inheritance of these patterns is known, and the polymorphism is under both thermal and predatory selection. At two sites the general direction of changes was towards lighter shells (yellow and less heavily banded), which is consistent with predictions based on on-going climatic change. At one site no directional changes were detected. At all sites there were significant shifts in morph frequencies between years, and our study contributes to the recognition that short-term changes in the states of populations often exceed long-term trends. Our interpretation was limited by the few time points available in the studied collections. We therefore stress the need for natural history collections to routinely collect large samples of common species, to allow much more reliable hind-casting of evolutionary responses to environmental change.

【 授权许可】

CC BY