ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution2021
In a nutshell, a reciprocal transplant experiment reveals local adaptation and fitness trade-offs in response to urban evolution in an acorn-dwelling ant.
Article in Evolution; international journal of organic evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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11 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- An integrated social-ecological-evolutionary-phenotypic (SEEP) approach to understanding animal responses to urbanization.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Urban developmental environments alter tadpole phenotypes depending on origin.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Comparative mitogenomic analysis provides evolutionary insights into Formica (Hymenoptera: Formicidae).PloS one · 2024Article
- From green to red: Urban heat stress drives leaf color evolution.Science advances · 2023Article
- Adaptive, maladaptive, neutral, or absent plasticity: Hidden caveats of reaction norms.Evolutionary applications · 2023Article
- Local adaptation: Causal agents of selection and adaptive trait divergence.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2022Article
- Selection in the city: Rapid and fine-scale evolution of urban eastern water dragons.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Drosophila melanogaster hosts coevolving with Pseudomonas entomophila pathogen show sex-specific patterns of local adaptation.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- The response of ants to climate change.Global change biology · 2022Review
- Population genomics and geographic dispersal in Chagas disease vectors: Landscape drivers and evidence of possible adaptation to the domestic setting.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- Urbanization extends flight phenology and leads to local adaptation of seasonal plasticity in Lepidoptera.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Urban-driven evolution is widely evident, but whether these changes confer fitness benefits and thus represent adaptive urban evolution is less clear. We performed a multiyear field reciprocal transplant experiment of acorn-dwelling ants across urban and rural environments. Fitness responses were consistent with local adaptation: we found a survival advantage of the "home" and "local" treatments compared to "away" and "foreign" treatments. Seasonal bias in survival was consistent with evolutionary patterns of gains and losses in thermal tolerance traits across the urbanization gradient. Rural ants in the urban environment were more vulnerable in the summer, putatively due to low heat tolerance, and urban ants in the rural environment were more vulnerable in winter, putatively due to an evolved loss of cold tolerance. The results for fitness via fecundity were also generally consistent with local adaptation, if somewhat more complex. Urban-origin ants produced more alates in their home versus away environment, and rural-origin ants had a local advantage in the rural environment. Overall, the magnitude of local adaptation was lower for urban ants in the novel urban environment compared with rural ants adapted to the ancestral rural environment, adding further evidence that species might not keep pace with anthropogenic change.
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