Speaker
Description
Environmental change often occurs abruptly, placing natural populations at risk of extinction unless they adapt rapidly—a process known as evolutionary rescue. While theory and empirical work suggest that genetic variation, population size, and the degree of maladaptation influence the likelihood of rescue, the roles of population history and ecological interactions remain less well understood. This presentation will focus on experimental work carried out on Tribolium castaneum, more commonly known as the red flour beetle. The experiments test how demographic history (e.g. population bottlenecks) and ecological processes (e.g. negative density dependence) influence probability of rescue. The findings of this study demonstrate that both historical and ecological contexts significantly shape evolutionary outcomes. This suggests that these factors must be integrated into predictive models of population persistence. This research highlights controlled experiments based on theoretical expectations, thereby highlighting the value of model-experiment dialogue in refining our understanding of evolutionary rescue. These insights suggest a number of promising avenues for collaboration, particu-
larly in identifying which theoretical predictions merit experimental validation—and vice versa.