A fitness trade-off between seasons causes multigenerational cycles in phenotype and population size
- University of Guelph, Canada
Abstract
Although seasonality is widespread and can cause fluctuations in the intensity and direction of natural selection, we have little information about the consequences of seasonal fitness trade-offs for population dynamics. Here we exposed populations of Drosophila melanogaster to repeated seasonal changes in resources across 58 generations and used experimental and mathematical approaches to investigate how viability selection on body size in the non-breeding season could affect demography. We show that opposing seasonal episodes of natural selection on body size interacted with both direct and delayed density dependence to cause populations to undergo predictable multigenerational density cycles. Our results provide evidence that seasonality can set the conditions for life-history trade-offs and density dependence, which can, in turn, interact to cause multigenerational population cycles.
Article and author information
Author details
Gustavo Sigrist Betini
Funding
Ontario Graduate Scholarship
- Gustavo Sigrist Betini
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Andrew G McAdam
- Cortland K Griswold
- D Ryan Norris
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Betini et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A fitness trade-off between seasons causes multigenerational cycles in phenotype and population size
eLife 6:e18770.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.18770
