Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Ecol Lett. 2020 Oct;23(10):1432-1441. doi: 10.1111/ele.13565. Epub 2020 Jul 12.
Both plasticity and genetic differentiation can contribute to phenotypic differences between populations. Using data on non-fitness traits from reciprocal transplant studies, we show that approximately 60% of traits exhibit co-gradient variation whereby genetic differences and plasticity-induced differences between populations are the same sign. In these cases, plasticity is about twice as important as genetic differentiation in explaining phenotypic divergence. In contrast to fitness traits, the amount of genotype by environment interaction is small. Of the 40% of traits that exhibit counter-gradient variation the majority seem to be hyperplastic whereby non-native individuals express phenotypes that exceed those of native individuals. In about 20% of cases plasticity causes non-native phenotypes to diverge from the native phenotype to a greater extent than if plasticity was absent, consistent with maladaptive plasticity. The degree to which genetic differentiation versus plasticity can explain phenotypic divergence varies a lot between species, but our proxies for motility and migration explain little of this variation.
可塑性和遗传分化都可以导致种群间表型差异。通过对相互移植研究中关于非适合度性状的数据进行分析，我们发现大约 60%的性状表现出共梯度变化，即种群间的遗传差异和可塑性诱导的差异具有相同的符号。在这些情况下，可塑性在解释表型分歧方面比遗传分化重要两倍左右。与适合度性状相反，基因型与环境相互作用的数量很小。在表现出反梯度变化的 40%的性状中，大多数似乎是超可塑性的，即非本地个体表现出的表型超过了本地个体的表型。在大约 20%的情况下，可塑性导致非本地表型与本地表型的差异程度大于如果没有可塑性的情况，这与适应不良的可塑性一致。遗传分化与可塑性解释表型分歧的程度在物种之间差异很大，但我们用于运动性和迁移性的替代指标几乎不能解释这种差异。
