Maclean H J, Kristensen T N, Sørensen J G, Overgaard J
Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, Denmark.
Department of Chemistry and Bioscience, Aalborg University, Aalborg E, Denmark.
J Evol Biol. 2018 Apr;31(4):530-542. doi: 10.1111/jeb.13241. Epub 2018 Feb 15.
Large comparative studies in animal ecology, physiology and evolution often use animals reared in the laboratory for many generations; however, the relevance of these studies hinges on the assumption that laboratory populations are still representative for their wild living conspecifics. In this study, we investigate whether laboratory-maintained and freshly collected animal populations are fundamentally different and whether data from laboratory-maintained animals are valid to use in large comparative investigations of ecological and physiological patterns. Here, we obtained nine species of Drosophila with paired populations of laboratory-maintained and freshly collected flies. These species, representing a range of ecotypes, were assayed for four stress-tolerance, two body-size traits and six life-history traits. For all of these traits, we observed small differences in species-specific comparisons between field and laboratory populations; however, these differences were unsystematic and laboratory maintenance did not eclipse fundamental species characteristics. To investigate whether laboratory maintenance influence the general patterns in comparative studies, we correlated stress tolerance and life-history traits with environmental traits for the laboratory-maintained and freshly collected populations. Based on this analysis, we found that the comparative physiological and ecological trait correlations are similar irrespective of provenience. This finding is important for comparative biology in general because it validates comparative meta-analyses based on laboratory-maintained populations.
动物生态学、生理学和进化领域的大型比较研究通常使用在实验室中饲养了许多代的动物；然而，这些研究的相关性取决于这样一个假设，即实验室种群仍然能够代表它们在野外生活的同种个体。在本研究中，我们调查了实验室饲养的动物种群和新采集的动物种群是否存在根本差异，以及来自实验室饲养动物的数据是否可用于生态和生理模式的大型比较研究。在这里，我们获得了九种果蝇，它们分别有实验室饲养的和新采集的成对种群。这些代表了一系列生态型的物种，被检测了四种抗逆性、两种体型特征和六种生活史特征。对于所有这些特征，我们在野外种群和实验室种群的物种特异性比较中观察到了微小差异；然而，这些差异是无规律的，实验室饲养并没有掩盖物种的基本特征。为了研究实验室饲养是否会影响比较研究中的一般模式，我们将实验室饲养的和新采集的种群的抗逆性和生活史特征与环境特征进行了关联分析。基于这一分析，我们发现无论来源如何，比较生理和生态特征的相关性都是相似的。这一发现对一般的比较生物学很重要，因为它验证了基于实验室饲养种群的比较荟萃分析。
