Seminar by Mafalda Ferreira

Monday March 11 we have a visit from Dr. Mafalda Ferreira from Uppsala University, and she kindly accepted to give a seminar (see abstract below).

Mafalda works on the intersection of ecology, evolution, and genomics to understand camouflage adaptation to climate change with different cool systems including mammals and birds (e.g. here). She will be around all day, please let me know if you want to have a chat with her.

Adapting to a rapidly changing seasonal environments: lessons from seasonal camouflage  

Abstract: Organisms inhabiting seasonal environments cycle between summer and winter phenotypes (e.g., reproduction, feeding and growth cycles, molt) to time energetically expensive life-history events relatively to seasonal peaks in resources. As alternation between phenotypes is mostly controlled by photoperiod, climate change-driven shifts in seasonality are creating fitness costly mismatches between life history stages and environmental conditions. Given the fast pace of climate change, we expect that standing genetic variation on the timing of phenotypic change or within life history stage to be more likely to seed rapid evolutionary responses to environmental change. Seasonal camouflage, the ability to alternate from brown to white between summer and winter, is an emerging model to study evolutionary responses to climate change. I will present a study on the evolution of adaptive winter color variation in the white-tailed jackrabbit (Lepus townsendii), a North American species undergoing population declines, to illustrate how we have incorporated the genetic basis of adaptation into predictions of population resilience to future snow cover declines. This species undergoes two annual molts in spring and autumn and displays extensive color variation in color within the winter phase of the molt. Using museum records, we show that winter pelage color closely tracks dynamics of snow cover across the range of white-tailed jackrabbits, suggesting that geographic variation for the trait is maintained by strong selection. Using whole genomes of winter collected specimens, we show that seasonal camouflage variation is primarily determined by additive genetic variation at two pigmentation genes. Using ecological and genetic modeling and forecasted environmental parameters, we predict that future declines in snow cover will strongly favor darker winter phenotypes across much of the white-tailed jackrabbit distribution. We also predict that low levels of standing adaptive variation should enable severely mismatched populations to adapt to this shift in snow cover conditions. However, adaptation to future snow cover may be impeded by ongoing population declines that appear to differentially threaten adaptive standing genetic variation. Our study illustrates how evolutionary genomics can be used to identify functional genetic variation of critical importance for climate change adaptation.