Speaker
Description
Human-induced changes to the environment result in faster and less predictable variation in environmental conditions. When organisms with fast generation times, such as freshwater ciliates, are exposed to this, they can experience rapid evolution. Studies on how these evolved species would respond to sudden environmental changes are scarce. Here, we investigate how variation in environmental conditions and genetic variation affects the growth ability and competition of the freshwater ciliates Colpidium striatum, Paramecium aurelia, Paramecium caudatum and Tetrahymena pyriformis. We used multiple salinity and copper concentrations as varying environmental conditions. We assessed how the growth ability differentiated between different clonal lineages within the same species, depending on the environmental conditions they experienced. Initial results show that growth ability differs between clonal lineages within the same species, but also among species. In addition, we also tested competition between ciliate species and clonal lineages under multiple stressor conditions. Understanding eco-evolutionary effects of environmental stressors is important in order to predict effects of global change.
