Plastic and genomic change of a newly established lizard population following a founder event

Iva Sabolić, Óscar Mira, Débora Y. C. Brandt, Duje Lisičić, Jessica Stapley, Maria Novosolov, Robert Bakarić, Ivan Cizelj, Marko Glogoški, Tomislav Hudina, Maxime Taverne, Morten E. Allentoft, Rasmus Nielsen, Anthony Herrel, Anamaria Štambuk*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Understanding how phenotypic divergence arises among natural populations remains one of the major goals in evolutionary biology. As part of competitive exclusion experiment conducted in 1971, 10 individuals of Italian wall lizard (Podarcis siculus (Rafinesque-Schmaltz, 1810)) were transplanted from Pod Kopište Island to the nearby island of Pod Mrčaru (Adriatic Sea). Merely 35 years after the introduction, the newly established population on Pod Mrčaru Island had shifted their diet from predominantly insectivorous towards omnivorous and changed significantly in a range of morphological, behavioural, physiological and ecological characteristics. Here, we combine genomic and quantitative genetic approaches to determine the relative roles of genetic adaptation and phenotypic plasticity in driving this rapid phenotypic shift. Our results show genome-wide genetic differentiation between ancestral and transplanted population, with weak genetic erosion on Pod Mrčaru Island. Adaptive processes following the founder event are indicated by highly differentiated genomic loci associating with ecologically relevant phenotypic traits, and/or having a putatively adaptive role across multiple lizard populations. Diverged traits related to head size and shape or bite force showed moderate heritability in a crossing experiment, but between-population differences in these traits did not persist in a common garden environment. Our results confirm the existence of sufficient additive genetic variance for traits to evolve under selection while also demonstrating that phenotypic plasticity and/or genotype by environment interactions are the main drivers of population differentiation at this early evolutionary stage.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere17255
JournalMolecular Ecology
Volume33
Issue number10
Number of pages15
ISSN0962-1083
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Keywords

  • bottleneck
  • heritability
  • invasive success
  • phenotypic plasticity
  • population crossing experiment
  • rapid evolution

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