Interspecific matings are by definition rare events in nature, but when they occur they can be very important, and not only because they might condition gene flow between species. Even when such matings have no genetic consequence, for instance if they do not yield any fertile hybrid offspring, they can still have an impact on the population dynamics of the species involved [1]. Such atypical pairings between heterospecific partners are usually regarded as detrimental or undesired; as they interfere with the occurrence or success of intraspecific matings, they are expected to cause a decline in absolute fitness.
The story is not always so simple however, and it might all depend on the timing of events and on the identity of the partners. Using the herbivorous mite Tetranychus urticae as a model, Clemente et al. [2] experimentally arranged matings with two other Tetranychus species that commonly share the same host plants as T. urticae. They carefully controlled the history of events: heterospecific matings could occur just before, just after, 24h before, or 24h after, a conspecific mating. Interestingly, the oviposition rate (total fecundity) of females was increased when mating with a heterospecific individual. This suggests that heterospecic sperm can stimulate oogenesis just as conspecific sperm does. Such a positive effect was observed for matings involving T. ludeni females and T. urticae males, but a negative effect is found in the interaction with T. evansi. Sex-ratio (fertilization success in those species) could also be impacted but, unlike fertilization, this occurred when the mating events were distant in time. This is is at odds with what is observed in conspecific matings, where sperm displacement occurs only if mating events are temporally close. Overall, the effects of heterospecific mating were quite variable and it is challenging to predict a single, general, effect of interspecific matings. The net effect will likely be context-dependent, depending on the relative frequency of the difference mating sequences and on how fecundity and sex-ratio contribute to overall fitness, both aspect strongly influenced by the population dynamics and structure.

References

[1] Gröning J. & Hochkirch A. 2008. Reproductive interference between animal species. The Quarterly Review of Biology 83: 257-282. doi: 10.1086/590510

[2] Clemente SH, Santos I, Ponce AR, Rodrigues LR, Varela SAM & Magalhaes S. 2017 Despite reproductive interference, the net outcome of reproductive interactions among spider mite species is not necessarily costly. bioRxiv 113274, ver. 4 of the 30th of June 2017. doi: 10.1101/113274

Cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) is a mating incompatibility that is induced by maternally inherited endosymbionts in many arthropods. These endosymbionts include, most famously, the alpha-proteobacterium Wolbachia pipientis (Yen & Barr 1971; Werren et al. 2008) but also the Bacteroidetes bacterium Cardinium hertigii (Zchori-Fein et al. 2001), a gamma-proteobacterium of the genus Rickettsiella (Rosenwald et al. 2020) and another, as yet undescribed alpha-proteobacterium (Takano et al. 2017). CI manifests as embryonic mortality in crosses between infected males and females that are uninfected or infected with a different strain, whereas embryos develop normally in all other crosses. This phenotype may enable the endosymbionts to spread rapidly within their host population. Exploiting this, CI-inducing Wolbachia are being harnessed to control insect-borne diseases (e.g., O'Neill 2018). Much progress elucidating the genetic basis and developmental mechanism of CI has been made in recent years, but many open questions remain (Shropshire et al. 2020).
Immediately following the discovery and early study of CI in mosquitoes, Laven (1959, 1967) proposed that CI could be an important driver of speciation. Indeed, bi-directional CI can strongly reduce gene flow between two populations due to the elimination of F1 embryos, so that CI can act as a trigger for genetic differentiation in the host (Telschow et al. 2002, 2005). This idea has received much attention, and a potential role for CI in incipient speciation has been demonstrated in several species (e.g., Bordenstein et al. 2001; Jaenike et al. 2006). However, we still don’t know how commonly CI actually triggers speciation, rather than being merely a minor player or secondary phenomenon. The problem is that in addition to CI, postzygotic reproductive isolation can also be caused by host-induced, nuclear incompatibilities. Determining the relative contributions of these two causes of isolation is difficult and has rarely been done.
The study by Cruz et al. (2020) addresses this problem head-on, using a study system of Tetranychus urticae spider mites. These cosmopolitan mites are infected with different strains of Wolbachia. They come in two different colour forms (red and green) that can co-occur sympatrically on the same host plant but exhibit various degrees of reproductive isolation. A complicating factor in spider mites is that they are haplodiploid: unfertilised eggs develop into haploid males and are therefore not affected by any postzygotic incompatibilities, whereas fertilised eggs normally develop into diploid females. In haplodiploids, Wolbachia-induced CI can either kill diploid embryos (as in diplodiploid species), or turn them into haploid males. In their study, Cruz et al. used three different populations (one of the green and two of the red form) and employed a full factorial experiment involving all possible combinations of crosses of Wolbachia infected or uninfected males and females. For each cross, they measured F1 embryonic and juvenile mortality as well as sex ratio, and they also measured F1 fertility and F2 viability. Their results showed that there is strong reduction in hybrid female production caused by Wolbachia-induced CI. However, independent of this and through a different mechanism, there is an even stronger reduction in hybrid production caused by host-associated incompatibilities. In combination with the also observed near-complete sterility of F1 hybrid females and full F2 hybrid breakdown (neither of which is caused by Wolbachia), the results indicate essentially complete reproductive isolation between the green and red forms of T. urticae.
Overall, this is an elegant study with an admirably clean and comprehensive experimental design. It demonstrates that Wolbachia can contribute to reproductive isolation between populations, but that host-induced mechanisms of reproductive isolation predominate in these spider mite populations. Further studies in this exiting system would be useful that also investigate the contribution of pre-zygotic isolation mechanisms such as assortative mating, ascertain whether the results can be generalised to other populations, and – most challengingly – establish the order in which the different mechanisms of reproductive isolation evolved.

References

Bordenstein, S. R., O'Hara, F. P., and Werren, J. H. (2001). Wolbachia-induced incompatibility precedes other hybrid incompatibilities in Nasonia. Nature, 409(6821), 707-710. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/35055543
Cruz, M. A., Magalhães, S., Sucena, É., and Zélé, F. (2020) Wolbachia and host intrinsic reproductive barriers contribute additively to post-mating isolation in spider mites. bioRxiv, 2020.06.29.178699, ver. 4 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Evolutionary Biology. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.29.178699
Jaenike, J., Dyer, K. A., Cornish, C., and Minhas, M. S. (2006). Asymmetrical reinforcement and Wolbachia infection in Drosophila. PLoS Biol, 4(10), e325. doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040325
Laven, H. (1959). SPECIATION IN MOSQUITOES Speciation by Cytoplasmic Isolation in the Culex Pipiens-Complex. In Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology (Vol. 24, pp. 166-173). Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
Laven, H. (1967). A possible model for speciation by cytoplasmic isolation in the Culex pipiens complex. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 37(2), 263-266.
O’Neill S.L. (2018) The Use of Wolbachia by the World Mosquito Program to Interrupt Transmission of Aedes aegypti Transmitted Viruses. In: Hilgenfeld R., Vasudevan S. (eds) Dengue and Zika: Control and Antiviral Treatment Strategies. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 1062. Springer, Singapore. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8727-1_24
Rosenwald, L.C., Sitvarin, M.I. and White, J.A. (2020). Endosymbiotic Rickettsiella causes cytoplasmic incompatibility in a spider host. doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1107
Shropshire, J. D., Leigh, B., and Bordenstein, S. R. (2020). Symbiont-mediated cytoplasmic incompatibility: what have we learned in 50 years?. Elife, 9, e61989. doi: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.61989
Takano et al. (2017). Unique clade of alphaproteobacterial endosymbionts induces complete cytoplasmic incompatibility in the coconut beetle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(23), 6110-6115. doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1618094114
Telschow, A., Hammerstein, P., and Werren, J. H. (2002). The effect of Wolbachia on genetic divergence between populations: models with two-way migration. the american naturalist, 160(S4), S54-S66. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/342153
Telschow, A., Hammerstein, P., and Werren, J. H. (2005). The effect of Wolbachia versus genetic incompatibilities on reinforcement and speciation. Evolution, 59(8), 1607-1619. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0014-3820.2005.tb01812.x
Werren, J. H., Baldo, L., and Clark, M. E. (2008). Wolbachia: master manipulators of invertebrate biology. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 6(10), 741-751. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1969
Yen, J. H., and Barr, A. R. (1971). New hypothesis of the cause of cytoplasmic incompatibility in Culex pipiens L. Nature, 232(5313), 657-658. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/232657a0
Zchori-Fein, E., Gottlieb, Y., Kelly, S. E., Brown, J. K., Wilson, J. M., Karr, T. L., and Hunter, M. S. (2001). A newly discovered bacterium associated with parthenogenesis and a change in host selection behavior in parasitoid wasps. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(22), 12555-12560. doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.221467498

Organisms very often display phenotypic plasticity, whereby the expression of trait (or suite of traits) changes in a consistent way as a function of some environmental variable. Sometimes this plastic response remains labile and so the trait continues to respond to the environment throughout an organism’s life, but there are also many examples in which environmental conditions during a critical developmental window irreversibly set the stage for how a trait will be expressed later in life.
Traditionally, most studies of phenotypic plasticity have considered how an organism’s phenotype is altered by the environment that it experiences (called within-generation plasticity) but there is growing interest in how an organism’s phenotype is altered by the environment experienced by its ancestors (called transgenerational plasticity) [1]. In the simplest cases an organism’s phenotype might be affected by the environmental conditions experienced by its parents. There are several examples of this phenomenon as well, including interesting cases where predator cues experiences by an organism’s parents dictate the extent to which it displays a defensive phenotype.
Tariel et al. [2] present a study that takes these ideas to the next logical step and examines transgenerational plasticity through three generations. They used a well-studied system of snails (Physa acuta) that display inducible defences in response to predator (crayfish) cues. The authors exposed three generations of snails to one of two treatments: the presence or absence of predator cues, and then examined a suite of behavioural and morphological traits associated with predator defence. This allowed them to determine if and how offspring, parental, and grandparental environment influence offspring phenotype.
Interestingly, their results do show that transgenerational plasticity can act across multiple generations. The patterns found were complex though and it is difficult at this stage to assess how likely it is that these responses are adaptive. For example, a behavioural trait appears to respond to grandparental but not parental environment, shell thickness responds to both, and snail weight and a composite index of morphology respond to neither. Exactly what this means in terms of an offspring’s fitness, however, is unclear. It is also not immediately clear from the study how predictive a grandparent’s environment is of the conditions likely to be faced by an individual. Further work will be needed on these issues to better interpret what this transgenerational plasticity means and to assess if it might be an evolved response to cope with varying predation pressure. It would also be useful to delve more deeply into the developmental mechanisms throughout which this plasticity occurs. Irrespective of these issues, however, the study does reveal that transgenerational plasticity across multiple generations can indeed occur and so cannot be ignored as a source of phenotypic variation.

References

[1] West-Eberhard, M. J. (2003). Developmental plasticity and evolution. Oxford University Press.
[2] Tariel, J., Plenet, S., and Luquet, E. (2019). Transgenerational plasticity of inducible defenses: combined effects of grand-parental, parental and current environments. bioRxiv, 589945, ver. 3, peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Evolutionary Biology. doi: 10.1101/589945

Is evolution adaptive? Not if there is no variation for natural selection to work with. Theory predicts that how fast a population can adapt to a new environment can be limited by the supply of new mutations coming into it. This supply, in turn, depends on two things: how often mutations occur and in how many individuals. If there are few mutations, or few individuals in whom they can originate, individuals will be mostly identical in their DNA, and natural selection will be impotent.
This theoretical prediction has been hard to test. The rate at which new mutations arise in a population can be manipulated experimentally, and some work has shown that the fitness of a population increases more rapidly if more new mutations appear per generation, lending support to the mutation-limitation hypothesis [1]. However, the question remains whether this limitation has played a role in the history of life over the evolutionary timescale. Maybe all natural populations are so large, the mutation rate so high, and/or the environment changes so slowly, that any novel variant required for adaptation is already there when selection starts to act? Some recent work does suggest that when strong selection begins to favor a certain phenotype, multiple distinct genetic variants producing this phenotype spread; this is what has happened, for instance, at the origin of insecticide resistance in wild populations of Drosophila melanogaster [2] or lactose persistence in humans [3]. In many other cases, though, adaptations seem to originate through a single mutation event, suggesting that the time needed for this mutation to arise may be important.
To complicate things, adaptation is hard to quantify. It leaves a trace in differences between individuals of the same species as well as of different species. However, this trace is often masked or confounded by other processes, including natural selection disfavoring newly arising deleterious variants, interference from selection acting at linked sites, and changes in population size. In 1991, McDonald and Kreitman [4] have come up with a method to infer the rate of adaptation in the presence of strong negative selection, and later work has developed upon it to control for some of the other confounders. Still, the method is data-intensive, and previous attempts to employ it to compare the rates of adaptation between species have yielded somewhat contradictory results.
The new paper by Rousselle et al. recommended by PCI Evol Biol [5] fills this gap. The authors use published data as well as their own newly generated dataset to analyze, in a McDonald and Kreitman-like framework, both closely and distantly related species. Importantly, these comparisons cover species with very different polymorphism levels, spanning two orders of magnitude of difference levels.
So is adaptation in fact limited by supply of new mutations? The answer is, it depends. It does indeed seem that the species with a lower level of polymorphism adapt at a lower rate, consistent with the mutation-limitation hypothesis. However, this only is true for those groups of species in which the variability is low. Therefore, if a population is very small or the mutation rate very low, there may be in fact not enough mutations to secure its need to adapt.
In more polymorphic species, and in comparisons of distant species, the data hint instead at the opposite relationship: the rate of adaptations declines with variability. This is consistent with a different explanation: when a population is small, it needs to adapt more frequently, repairing the weakly deleterious mutations that can’t be prevented by selection under small population sizes.
There are quite a few problems small populations have to deal with. Some of them are ecological: e.g., small numbers make populations more vulnerable to stochastic fluctuations in size or sex ratio. Others, however, are genetic. Small populations are prone to inbreeding depression and have an increased rate of genetic drift, leading to spread of deleterious alleles. Indeed, selection against deleterious mutations is less efficient when populations are small, and less numerable species accumulate more of such mutations over the course of evolution [6]. The work by Rouselle et al. [5] suggests that small populations also face an additional burden: a reduced ability to adapt.
Has the rate of adaptation in our own species also been limited by our deficit of diversity? The data hints at this. Homo sapiens, as well as the two other studied extinct representatives of the genus Homo, Neanderthals and Denisovans, belong to the domain of relatively low polymorphism levels, where an increase in polymorphism matters for the rate at which adaptive substitutions accumulate. Perhaps, if our ancestors were more numerous or more mutable, they would have been able to get themselves out of trouble, and there would be multiple human species still alive rather than just one.

References

[1] G, J. A., Visser, M. de, Zeyl, C. W., Gerrish, P. J., Blanchard, J. L., and Lenski, R. E. (1999). Diminishing Returns from Mutation Supply Rate in Asexual Populations. Science, 283(5400), 404–406. doi: 10.1126/science.283.5400.404
[2] Karasov, T., Messer, P. W., and Petrov, D. A. (2010). Evidence that Adaptation in Drosophila Is Not Limited by Mutation at Single Sites. PLOS Genetics, 6(6), e1000924. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000924
[3] Jones, B. L., Raga, T. O., Liebert, A., Zmarz, P., Bekele, E., Danielsen, E. T., Olsen, A. K., Bradman, N., Troelsen, J. T., and Swallow, D. M. (2013). Diversity of Lactase Persistence Alleles in Ethiopia: Signature of a Soft Selective Sweep. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 93(3), 538–544. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.07.008
[4] McDonald, J. H., and Kreitman, M. (1991). Adaptive protein evolution at the Adh locus in Drosophila. Nature, 351(6328), 652–654. doi: 10.1038/351652a0
[5] Rousselle, M., Simion, P., Tilak, M. K., Figuet, E., Nabholz, B., and Galtier, N. (2019). Is adaptation limited by mutation? A timescale-dependent effect of genetic diversity on the adaptive substitution rate in animals. BioRxiv, 643619, ver 4 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community In Evolutionary Biology. doi: 10.1101/643619
[6] Popadin, K., Polishchuk, L. V., Mamirova, L., Knorre, D., and Gunbin, K. (2007). Accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations in mitochondrial protein-coding genes of large versus small mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(33), 13390–13395. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0701256104

One can only hope that one day, we will be able to evaluate how the ecological complexity surrounding natural populations affects their ability to adapt. This is more like a long term quest than a simple scientific aim. Many steps are heading in the right direction. This paper by Monroe and colleagues (2021) is one of them.
Many ecological and genetic mechanisms shape the evolutionary potential of phenotypic trait variation and many of them involve environmental heterogeneity (Pujol et al 2018). To date, we cannot look into these ecological and genetic mechanisms without oversimplifying their effects. We often look into trait variation one trait at a time albeit the variation of multiple phenotypic traits is often linked at the genetic or environmental level. As a consequence, we put our conclusions at risk by not accounting for the reciprocal impacts of trait changes upon each other (Teplitsky et al 2014). We also usually restrict the study of a continuous gradient of environmental conditions to a few conditions because it would otherwise be impossible to model its environmental effect. As a consequence, we miss the full picture of the continuous often nonlinear phenotypic plastic response. Whether the trait undergo threshold effect changes thereby remains obscured to us. Collectively, these issues impede our ability to understand how selection shapes the ecological strategy of organisms under variable environments.
In this paper, Monroe and colleagues (2021) propose an original approach that raised to these two challenges. They analysed phenotypic plastic changes in response to a continuous environment in a multidimensional trait space, namely the response of Brachypodium plant developmental and physiological traits to a continuous gradient of soil moisture. They used dry down experimental treatments to produce the continuous soil moisture gradient and compared the plant capacity to use water between annual B. distachyon and perennial B. sylvaticum. Their results revealed the best mathematical functions that model the nonlinear curvature of the continuous plastic response of Brachypodium plants. This work reinforces our view that nonlinear plastic responses can result in greater or lesser trait values at any stage of the environmental gradient that were unexpected on the basis of linear predictors (Gienapp and Brommer 2014). Their findings also imply that different threshold responses characterize different genotypes. These could otherwise have been missed by a classical approach. By shedding light on unforeseen interactions between traits that make their correlation vary along the nonlinear response, they were able to describe more accurately Brachypodium ecological strategies and the changes in evolutionary constraints along the soil moisture gradient.
Their empirical approach allows to test what environmental conditions maximises the opportunity for selection to shape trait variation. For example, it revealed unforeseen divergence in potentially adaptive mechanisms or life history strategies – and not just trait values – between annual and perennial species of Brachypodium. Behind every environmental variation of the constraints to the future evolutionary change of multiple traits, we can expect that the evolutionary history of the populations shaped their trait genetic correlations. Investigating the nonlinear signature of adaptive evolution across continuous environments will get us into uncharted territory.
Our ability to predict the adaptive potential of species is limited. With their approach of continuous environmental gradients beyond linearity, Monroe and collaborators (2021) improve our understanding of plant phenotypic responses and open a brand new range of exciting developments. As they mention: "the opportunity for scaling up" their approach is big. To illustrate this prospect, I can easily think of an example: the quantitative genetic random regression model. This model allows to use any degree of genetic relatedness in a wild population to estimate the genetic variation of phenotypic plastic reaction norms (Nussey et al 2007, Pujol and Galaud 2013). However, in this approach, only a few modalities of the environmental gradient are used to model nonlinear phenotypic plastic responses. From there, it is rather intuitive. Combining the best of these two approaches (continuity of genetic relatedness in the wild & continuity of environmental gradient in experiments) could open ground breaking new perspectives in research.

References

Gienapp P. & J.E. Brommer. 2014. Evolutionary dynamics in response to climate change. In: Charmentier A, Garant D, Kruuk LEB, editors. Quantitative genetics in the wild. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford. pp. 254–273. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199674237.003.0015
Monroe, J. G., Cai, H., and Des Marais, D. L. (2020). Trait plasticity and covariance along a continuous soil moisture gradient. bioRxiv, 2020.02.17.952853, ver. 5 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Evol Biol. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.17.952853
Pujol et al. (2018). The missing response to selection in the wild. Trends in ecology & evolution, 33(5), 337-346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.02.007
Pujol, B., and Galaud, J. P. (2013). A practical guide to quantifying the effect of genes underlying adaptation in a mixed genomics and evolutionary ecology approach. Botany Letters, 160(3-4), 197-204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/12538078.2013.799045
Nussey, D. H., Wilson, A. J., and Brommer, J. E. (2007). The evolutionary ecology of individual phenotypic plasticity in wild populations. Journal of evolutionary biology, 20(3), 831-844. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01300.x
Teplitsky et al. (2014). Assessing multivariate constraints to evolution across ten long-term avian studies. PLoS One, 9(3), e90444. doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0090444