Publication Date:
2009-07-04
Description:
Environmental change, including climate change, can cause rapid phenotypic change via both ecological and evolutionary processes. Because ecological and evolutionary dynamics are intimately linked, a major challenge is to identify their relative roles. We exactly decomposed the change in mean body weight in a free-living population of Soay sheep into all the processes that contribute to change. Ecological processes contribute most, with selection--the underpinning of adaptive evolution--explaining little of the observed phenotypic trend. Our results enable us to explain why selection has so little effect even though weight is heritable, and why environmental change has caused a decline in the body size of Soay sheep.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Ozgul, Arpat -- Tuljapurkar, Shripad -- Benton, Tim G -- Pemberton, Josephine M -- Clutton-Brock, Tim H -- Coulson, Tim -- P01 AG022500/AG/NIA NIH HHS/ -- P01/AG/22500/AG/NIA NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2009 Jul 24;325(5939):464-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1173668. Epub 2009 Jul 2.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19574350" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Adaptation, Biological
;
Animals
;
*Biological Evolution
;
*Body Size
;
Body Weight
;
Ecosystem
;
*Environment
;
Female
;
Male
;
Models, Biological
;
Phenotype
;
Sheep, Domestic/*anatomy & histology/growth & development
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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