Publication Date:
2013-10-19
Description:
Adaptation to climate, evolving over contemporary time scales, could facilitate rapid range expansion across environmental gradients. Here, we examine local adaptation along a climatic gradient in the North American invasive plant Lythrum salicaria. We show that the evolution of earlier flowering is adaptive at the northern invasion front where it increases fitness as much as, or more than, the effects of enemy release and the evolution of increased competitive ability. However, early flowering decreases investment in vegetative growth, which reduces fitness by a factor of 3 in southern environments where the North American invasion commenced. Our results demonstrate that local adaptation can evolve quickly during range expansion, overcoming environmental constraints on propagule production.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Colautti, Robert I -- Barrett, Spencer C H -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2013 Oct 18;342(6156):364-6. doi: 10.1126/science.1242121.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, 25 Willcocks Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3B2.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24136968" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Acclimatization/genetics/*physiology
;
*Climate Change
;
Evolution, Molecular
;
Genetic Fitness
;
Lythrum/genetics/*physiology
;
Plant Weeds/genetics/*physiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
