Broad geographic sampling reveals the shared basis and environmental correlates of seasonal adaptation in Drosophila
Abstract
To advance our understanding of adaptation to temporally varying selection pressures, we identified signatures of seasonal adaptation occurring in parallel among Drosophila melanogaster populations. Specifically, we estimated allele frequencies genome-wide from flies sampled early and late in the growing season from 20 widely dispersed populations. We identified parallel seasonal allele frequency shifts across North America and Europe, demonstrating that seasonal adaptation is a general phenomenon of temperate fly populations. Seasonally fluctuating polymorphisms are enriched in large chromosomal inversions and we find a broad concordance between seasonal and spatial allele frequency change. The direction of allele frequency change at seasonally variable polymorphisms can be predicted by weather conditions in the weeks prior to sampling, linking the environment and the genomic response to selection. Our results suggest that fluctuating selection is an important evolutionary force affecting patterns of genetic variation in Drosophila.
Data availability
- All raw sequence data have been deposited to the NCBI short read archive (SRA; BioProject Accession #PRJNA308584; accession numbers for each sample can be found in Supplemental Table 1).- Code to conduct these analyses, primary results files, and code to reproduce the figures are available at https://github.com/machadoheather/dmel_seasonal_RTEC.- VCF files with the raw allele frequencies per population and a R-data file of allele frequencies and effective sample sizes (Nc; compatible with scripts) are available on DataDryad (https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.4r7b826).
-
Data from: Broad geographic sampling reveals predictable, pervasive, and strong seasonal adaptation in DrosophilaDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.4r7b826.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
NIH Office of the Director (R01GM100366)
- Dmitri A Petrov
NIH Office of the Director (R35GM118165)
- Dmitri A Petrov
NIH Office of the Director (R01GM100366,R01GM137430)
- Alan Bergland
NIH Office of the Director (F32GM097837,R35GM119686)
- Alan Bergland
European Commission (H2020-ERC-2014-CoG-647900)
- Josefa González
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2018-05551)
- Thomas Merritt
Canada Research Chairs (950-230113)
- Thomas Merritt
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Machado 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.
Metrics
-
- 4,026
- views
-
- 482
- downloads
-
- 91
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Ecology
For the first time in any animal, we show that nocturnal bull ants use the exceedingly dim polarisation pattern produced by the moon for overnight navigation. The sun or moon can provide directional information via their position; however, they can often be obstructed by clouds, canopy, or the horizon. Despite being hidden, these bodies can still provide compass information through the polarised light pattern they produce/reflect. Sunlight produces polarised light patterns across the overhead sky as it enters the atmosphere, and solar polarised light is a well-known compass cue for navigating animals. Moonlight produces an analogous pattern, albeit a million times dimmer than sunlight. Here, we show evidence that polarised moonlight forms part of the celestial compass of navigating nocturnal ants. Nocturnal bull ants leave their nest at twilight and rely heavily on the overhead solar polarisation pattern to navigate. Yet many foragers return home overnight when the sun cannot guide them. We demonstrate that these bull ants use polarised moonlight to navigate home during the night, by rotating the overhead polarisation pattern above homing ants, who alter their headings in response. Furthermore, these ants can detect this cue throughout the lunar month, even under crescent moons, when polarised light levels are at their lowest. Finally, we show the long-term incorporation of this moonlight pattern into the ants’ path integration system throughout the night for homing, as polarised sunlight is incorporated throughout the day.
-
- Ecology
Climatic warming can shift community composition driven by the colonization-extinction dynamics of species with different thermal preferences; but simultaneously, habitat fragmentation can mediate species’ responses to warming. As this potential interactive effect has proven difficult to test empirically, we collected data on birds over 10 years of climate warming in a reservoir subtropical island system that was formed 65 years ago. We investigated how the mechanisms underlying climate-driven directional change in community composition were mediated by habitat fragmentation. We found thermophilization driven by increasing warm-adapted species and decreasing cold-adapted species in terms of trends in colonization rate, extinction rate, occupancy rate and population size. Critically, colonization rates of warm-adapted species increased faster temporally on smaller or less isolated islands; cold-adapted species generally were lost more quickly temporally on closer islands. This provides support for dispersal limitation and microclimate buffering as primary proxies by which habitat fragmentation mediates species range shift. Overall, this study advances our understanding of biodiversity responses to interacting global change drivers.