Resumen
Rare extreme “black swan” disturbances can impact ecosystems in many ways, such as destroying habitats, depleting resources, and causing high mortality. In rivers, for instance, exceptional floods that occur infrequently (e.g., so-called “50-year floods”) can strongly impact the abundance of fishes and other aquatic organisms. Beyond such ecological effects, these floods could also impact intraspecific diversity by elevating genetic drift or dispersal and by imposing strong selection, which could then influence the population's ability to recover from disturbance. And yet, natural systems might be resistant (show little change) or resilient (show rapid recovery) even to rare extreme events – perhaps as a result of selection due to past events. We considered these possibilities in two rivers where native guppies experienced two extreme floods – one in 2005 and another in 2016. For each river, we selected four sites and used archived “historical” samples to compare levels of genetic and phenotypic diversity before vs. after floods. Genetic diversity was represented by 33 neutral microsatellite markers, and phenotypic diversity was represented by body length and male melanic (black) colour. We found that genetic diversity and population structure was mostly “resistant” to even these extreme floods; whereas the larger impacts on phenotypic diversity were short-lived, suggesting additional “resilience”. We discuss the determinants of these two outcomes for guppies facing floods, and then consider the general implications for the resistance and resilience of intraspecific variation to black swan disturbances.
Idioma original | English |
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Páginas (desde-hasta) | 1017-1028 |
Número de páginas | 12 |
Publicación | Molecular Ecology |
Volumen | 30 |
N.º | 4 |
DOI | |
Estado | Published - feb. 2021 |
Nota bibliográfica
Funding Information:We thank all field assistants and students for guppy collection over the years, especially Sandra Klemet‐N’Guessan, Adam Reddon and Vincent Galloy who hiked through landslides to sample sites after the December 2016 flood. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments, which improved the manuscript. Permits for collection and exportation were obtained from the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries of Trinidad. Fish handling was in compliance with a McGill Animal Use Protocol. This study was funded by FRQNT TEAM grants to Marilyn Scott, Gregor Fussmann and Andrew Hendry; as well as NSERC Discovery grants to Andrew Hendry and Paul Bentzen. Léa Blondel was funded by the BESS NSERC CREATE grant and by a Delise Alison Award from the Redpath Museum at McGill University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
ASJC Scopus Subject Areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Genetics
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article
- Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't