The story of the peppered moth is a textbook evolutionary tale. As coal smoke darkened tree bark near England’s cities during the Industrial Revolution, white-bodied peppered moths became conspicuous targets for predators and their numbers quickly dwindled. Meanwhile, black-bodied moths, which had been rare, thrived and became dominant in their newly darkened environment.
It’s a classic example of how environmental change drives species evolution. But in recent years, scientists have begun thinking about the inverse process. Might there be a feedback loop in which species evolution drives ecological change? Now, a new study shows some of the best evidence yet for that very phenomenon.
“The idea here is that in addition to the environment shaping the traits of organisms through evolution, those trait changes should feed back and drive changes in the environment through predator-prey relationships and other ecological interactions between species,” said Jonah Piovia-Scott, associate professor of biological sciences at Washington State University and a lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Documenting changes
For the last 20 years, Piovia-Scott and his colleagues have been observing the evolutionary dynamics of anole lizard populations on a chain of tiny islands in the Bahamas. Made up of around 40 islands ranging in area from a few dozen to a few hundred meters, the environment is small enough that the researchers can keep close tabs on the lizards living there — and the islands are far enough apart that lizards can’t easily hop from one to another, so distinct populations can be isolated from each other.
Their research shows that when lizards evolve shorter legs, this can spur vegetation growth and decrease spider populations on small islands in the Bahamas. This major shift in the natural food web is one of the first times, the researchers say, that such dramatic evolution-to-ecology effects have been documented in a natural setting.
“We really need to understand how those dynamics work so we can make predictions about how populations are going to persist, and what sort of ecological changes might result,” said Jason Kolbe, professor of biological sciences at the University of Rhode Island and another of the study’s senior authors.
Previous research had shown that brown anoles adapt quickly to the characteristics of surrounding vegetation. In habitats where the diameter of brush and tree limbs is smaller, natural selection favors lizards with shorter legs, which enable individuals to move more quickly when escaping predators or chasing a snack. In contrast, lankier lizards tend to fare better where the tree and plant limbs are thicker. Researchers have shown that this limb length trait can evolve quickly in brown anoles — in just a few generations.
For this new study, Piovia-Scott and his fellow researchers wanted to see how the evolution of lizard’s limb length might affect the ecosystems on the tiny Bahamian islands. The idea was to separate short- and long-legged lizards on islands of their own, then look for differences in how the lizard populations affect the ecology of their island homes.
Armed with specialized lizard-wrangling gear — poles with tiny lassos made of dental floss at the end — the team captured hundreds of brown anoles. They then measured the leg length of each lizard, keeping the ones whose limbs were either especially long or especially short and returning the rest to the wild. Once they had distinct populations of short- and long-limbed lizards, they set each population free on islands that had no lizards living on them at the time.
Since the experimental islands were mostly covered by smaller diameter vegetation, the researchers expected that the short-legged lizards would be better adapted to that environment, that is, more maneuverable and better able to catch prey in the trees and brush. The question the researchers wanted to answer was whether the ecological effects of those highly effective hunters differed from those of longer-limbed lizards.
After eight months, the researchers checked back on the islands to look for ecological differences between islands stocked with the short- and long-legged groups. The differences, it turned out, were substantial.
On islands with shorter-legged lizards, populations of web spiders — a key prey item for brown anoles — were reduced by 41% when more lizards were present. There were significant differences in plant growth as well. Because the short-legged lizards were better at preying on insect herbivores, plants flourished. On islands with short-legged lizards, buttonwood trees grew twice as fast as those on islands with long-legged lizards, the researchers found.
“These findings help us close the feedback loop between ecology and evolution,” Piovia-Scott said. “We knew from previous research that ecological factors shape limb length, and now we show the reciprocal relationship: limb length shapes the ecological characteristics of these island ecosystems.”
Understanding the full scope of interactions between evolution and ecology will be helpful in predicting environmental outcomes, the researchers say — particularly as human activities accelerate the pace of both evolutionary and ecological change worldwide.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (DMS-1716803 and DEB-2012985).
