Experimental Evolution under Fluctuating Thermal Conditions Does Not Reproduce Patterns of Adaptive Clinal Differentiation in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

Experimental evolution can be a useful tool for testing the impact of environmental factors on adaptive changes in populations, and this approach is being increasingly used to understand the potential for evolutionary responses in populations under changing climates. However, selective factors will often be more complex in natural populations than in laboratory environments and produce different patterns of adaptive differentiation. Here we test the ability of laboratory experimental evolution under different temperature cycles to reproduce well-known patterns of clinal variation in Drosophila melanogaster. Six fluctuating thermal regimes mimicking the natural temperature conditions along th..