Meeting Abstract
Range expansions are becoming more common as humans move organisms around the planet and alter the climate, forcing species to adjust to new conditions or move to new areas. Some organisms appear better able to endure new conditions than others. Indeed, some introduced species often become pests in new areas, spreading rapidly across habitats they never occupied previously. In many plants and invertebrates, phenotypic plasticity is a particularly important mechanism influencing range expansion; in vertebrates though, there is less evidence for plasticity as a driver of success in new areas. Here, we discuss the potential role of phenotypic plasticity in range expansions of house sparrows, one of the world’s most common birds. In particular, we discuss how variation in the regulatory architecture of glucocorticoids, steroid hormones that affect various organismal functions, and a few other key genes (i.e., Toll-like receptors) might have been important to multiple range expansions of house sparrows (i.e., Kenya, Senegal, and North America). We propose that ‘epigenetic potential’, the propensity for some individuals to adjust gene expression via DNA methylation and related mechanisms, partly facilitated the colonization success in this species. Specifically, we expect that house sparrows are exceptionally capable of altering the roles of key nodes in physiological regulatory networks, which gives them exceptional abilities to adjust to prevailing conditions, even when such conditions are evolutionarily novel.
