Featured Publication
Post DM, Palkovacs EP. Eco-evolutionary feedbacks in community and ecosystem ecology: interactions between the ecological theatre and the evolutionary play.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2009, 364: 1629-1640.
The first featured publication is on a topic that will appeal to the more theoretically and philosophically minded ecologist. It is a paper that tries to make the point that not only are organisms affected by their environments, but that normal organism functioning can alter the environment. Thus, organisms create a feedback on their environment which is not only ecologically important, but has consequences on longer, evolutionary time scales. Such feedbacks are termed “eco-evolutionary feedbacks” by the authors. Ecological feedbacks have been part of the mainstream of limnological thinking for at least a couple of decades. The “new” bit in this paper is the idea that evolution can be influenced by such feedbacks. The authors provide 5 examples of systems in which they argue such feedbacks are likely to exist. Their most thoroughly argued example is based on the alewife/zooplankton system in North America, in which landlocked and anadromous populations of alewives differentially exploit their prey, thereby creating differential pressures on zooplankton communities. Other aquatic examples include algal-rotifer chemostats, and Trinidadian guppies (life history traits and nutrient cycling). Unfortunately, evolutionary mechanisms do not readily lend themselves to rigorous scientific falsification and so the conclusions of the paper merely call for more thought to be put into researching this emerging theory of eco-evolutionary feedbacks. While these ideas are perhaps new to some, James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis have been arguing the importance of such eco-evolutionary feedbacks since Gaia was just a hypothesis (Gaia has apparently now evolved to become a theory). The Gaia hypothesis, was more-or-less embraced immediately by climatologists and geologists, but has been shunned and attacked, by evolutionary biologists since it was formally proposed in the early 70s. In response to the recalcitrant biologists, Lovelock attempted to demonstrate how Gaia might work by developing an evolution-based computer model called “Daisyworld”. However, this did little to convince the skeptics. Nevertheless, eco-evolutionary ideas are now becoming more accepted within biology, as evidenced by the Post and Palkovacs paper. Incidentally, I had a brief correspondence with Lovelock in 2002, after I read his autobiography. He had this to say about limnology and in particular, G.E. Hutchinson: “G.E. Hutchinson was one of my heroes. His chapter in Kuiper’s book on the Solar System was inspirational. Limnology must be a mind broadening science.” In my view, the Post and Palkovacs paper attempts a bit of ecological catch-up, which is long overdue. Is the paper convincing or definitive? No. But it presents some interesting ideas and examples which are worth considering.
Marc Schallenberg (with input from members of the Aquatic Sciences Journal Club at University of Otago).