ArticleEvolutionary applications2015
Do stressful conditions make adaptation difficult? Guppies in the oil-polluted environments of southern Trinidad.
Article in Evolutionary applications, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Executive functioning in wild guppies: investigating the impact of a pharmaceutical pollutant.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Oil Things Bright and Beautiful? How Hydrocarbon Pollution Impacts Guppy Ornamentation.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Evolutionary mismatch along salinity gradients in a Neotropical water strider.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Causes of maladaptation.Evolutionary applications · 2019Review
- 100-year time series reveal little morphological change following impoundment and predator invasion in two Neotropical characids.Evolutionary applications · 2019Article
- Conservation through the lens of (mal)adaptation: Concepts and meta-analysis.Evolutionary applications · 2019Article
- Direct and indirect effects of chemical contaminants on the behaviour, ecology and evolution of wildlife.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Aggressive desert goby males also court more, independent of the physiological demands of salinity.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Evolutionary responses to crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill by the copepodEvolutionary applications · 2017Article
- Evolutionary toxicology: Toward a unified understanding of life's response to toxic chemicals.Evolutionary applications · 2017Article
- Environmental exposure does not explain putative maladaptation in road-adjacent populations.Oecologia · 2017Article
- Adaptive capabilities and fitness consequences associated with pollution exposure in fish.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Biodiversity and ecosystem risks arising from using guppies to control mosquitoes.Biology letters · 2016Review
- Spatial pattern of invasion and the evolutionary responses of native plant species.Evolutionary applications · 2016Article
- Environmental context and magnitude of disturbance influence trait-mediated community responses to wastewater in streams.Ecology and evolution · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 6 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability of populations to rapidly adapt to new environments will determine their future in an increasingly human-modified world. Although meta-analyses do frequently uncover signatures of local adaptation, they also reveal many exceptions. We suggest that particular constraints on local adaptation might arise when organisms are exposed to novel stressors, such as anthropogenic pollution. To inform this possibility, we studied the extent to which guppies (Poecilia reticulata) show local adaptation to oil pollution in southern Trinidad. Neutral genetic markers revealed that paired populations in oil-polluted versus not-polluted habitats diverged independently in two different watersheds. Morphometrics revealed some divergence (particularly in head shape) between these environments, some of which was parallel between rivers. Reciprocal transplant experiments in nature, however, found little evidence of local adaptation based on survival and growth. Moreover, subsequent laboratory experiments showed that the two populations from oil-polluted sites showed only weak local adaptation even when compared to guppies from oil-free northern Trinidad. We conclude that guppies show little local adaptation to oil pollution, which might result from the challenges associated with adaptation to particularly stressful environments. It might also reflect genetic drift owing to small population sizes and/or high gene flow between environments.
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