Meeting Abstract
S3.9 Monday, Jan. 4 Balancing local differentiation and adaptation with dispersal potential: limits and opportunities for range extensions, divergence, and invasion COHEN, C.S.*; PADILLA, D.K.; San Francisco State University; Stony Brook University sarahcoh@sfsu.edu
At an inaugural Larval Ecology summit in 1986, R. Strathmann summarized hypotheses about life history traits potentially associated with dispersal capability, leading to local adaptation and population structure, followed by inferences about species range distributions, and extinction probabilities. Since that time, advances in molecular methods have allowed the testing of hypotheses on the connection between life history variation, dispersal, population structure, and local and species level extinction. Further, advances in specific knowledge about candidate genes that may be related to particular selective forces allows testing of the relative roles of drift and selection on population differentiation. Species with limited natural dispersal potential across all life stages offer opportunities to test hypotheses about conditions appropriate for local adaptation. Highly variable genetic systems, such as immune system and biotransformation loci, may offer the most obvious cases where local adaptation may occur. In these cases, high genetic diversity and strong selection may together promote differentiation, depending on the relative temporal and spatial landscape of selection in comparison to the range of dispersal and species flexibility. Thus, predictions based on variation in life history traits may be coupled to population genetic parameters affecting the selective impact of different local environments. In addition to the geological scale comparisons suggested by Strathmann for testing hypotheses about local adaptation and extinction and life histories, the increasingly rich literature on marine invasions offers an additional opportunity to evaluate local adaptation, sometimes in replicated environments, to biotic factors like challenges from parasites, competitors and predators, as well as abiotic environmental features.
