Speaker
Description
While we often track evolution for single traits in microbes, understanding and projecting their ecological functions often requires considering their integrated multitrait phenotypes. For example, understanding how the responses of phytoplankton to environmental change translate into changes in ocean primary production changes depends not only on the direct responses to selection (e.g. warming), but also on correlations between traits such as cell size and composition, nutrient acquisition and population growth rates. In addition, phytoplankton evolve in a highly dynamic environment that can produce migration and demographic events with large effects on evolution. We used experimental evolution to explore how the model diatom genus Thalassiosira moves about multitrait space under relaxed and directional selection in standard and warmed environments. I will discuss how rapid evolution in trait correlations that are often modelled as fundamental or fixed tradeoffs constrains phenotypic shifts in Thalassiosira, and how dynamic ocean environments could facilitate these rapid evolution events. I will also discuss how transient shifts in multitrait correlations may impact the relationship between gene or lineage diversity, which is relatively easy to survey in the surface ocean, and trait values or diversity in phytoplankton.
