Research

Species persist in continually changing environments, increasingly so under climate change. Evolutionary responses to rapid environmental change – genetic adaptation and phenotypic plasticity – will be key determinants of persistence for many species. We are interested in understanding what factors underpin, facilitate and impeded adaptation to rapid environmental change.

Research questions

Our research program spans two broad areas of interest and is highly collaborative:

1. Assessing adaptive capacity within and across species

  • What evolutionary processes facilitate and constrain the capacity of species to adapt to rapid environmental change?
  • Can we predict the adaptive capacity of species, and therefore their climate risk?
  • Why are some species more vulnerable to climate change than others?

Answers to these questions matter because predictions of climate risk vary greatly depending on whether evolution is considered or not (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Predicting capacity to adapt to climate change matters.
(a) Current distribution of Drosophila ironensis. Warm colours for high, cool colours for low population persistence. (b) Predicted range contraction under climate change without adaptive capacity. (c) Prediction with adaptive capacity (evolution buys time for this species). Risk is overestimated when adaptive capacity is not considered (b compared to c). From Bush et al (2016) Ecology Letters.

2. Phenotypic plasticity and context dependent adaptation: focussing on the complexity of adaptation that comes from the interplay between genetic variation, the sexes and the environment.

  • How does the environment influence the expression of genetic variation that underpins adaptation?
  • What role does nutrition play in mediating evolutionary responses to rapid environmental change?
  • Do the sexes differ in their capacity to adapt to environmental change?
  • How do biotic interactions, such as pathogen exposure, affect the adaptive capacity of species?

Experimental approaches

We use a range of approaches including comparisons of populations collected from along climatic gradients in Australia (Figure 2), experimental evolution, quantitative genetics, phenotypic manipulations, eco-physiology and genomics (GWAS, RNA-seq, etc).

Figure 2. Climate variation across Australia. Lighter colors = warmer temperatures

We work with arthropods, in particular Drosophila species

While they are not cute and cuddly, arthropods are highly diverse and comprise more than 80% of all animal species. They underpin critical ecosystem functions (e.g. nutrient cycling, pollination, food web structure) and are experiencing unprecedented declines under climate change. Importantly, many of the pests and disease vectors that threaten human health and food security are small terrestrial arthropods, like Drosophila. What we learn from Drosophila can be applied more generally to other species that are much more difficult to work with experimentally.

Several hundred Drosophila species in Australia occupy a diversity of climatic conditions. Many species are restricted to the tropics, a few are temperature specialists and some have broad distributions across climatic regions. This makes Drosophila an ideal study system for understanding how organisms adapt to changing environmental conditions. Key collaborators at Monash on the Drosophila work include Christen Mirth, Matt Hall and Tim Connallon.

Collaborators

Monash University collaborators

We work with Monash collaborators on climate change impacts on host-pathogen interactions and disease dynamics under climate change (Matt Hall), and climate change vulnerability of marine organisms (Keyne Monro).

Specifically we work on:

  • mosquitoes that vector diseases such as Dengue,
  • Daphnia that are an important model for understanding host-pathogen interactions and disease dynamics, and
  • marine tube-worms that are important ecosystem engineers of Australia’s coastline.

External industry collaborators