Journal
EVOLUTION
Volume 65, Issue 9, Pages 2514-2529Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL
DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01313.x
Keywords
Fitness trade-off; G matrix; purple loosestrife; quantitative genetics
Categories
Funding
- University of North Carolina's research computing cluster
- Ontario Government
- University of Toronto
- Ontario Premier's Discovery Award
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Canada Research Chair program
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Evolution during biological invasion may occur over contemporary timescales, but the rate of evolutionary change may be inhibited by a lack of standing genetic variation for ecologically relevant traits and by fitness trade-offs among them. The extent to which these genetic constraints limit the evolution of local adaptation during biological invasion has rarely been examined. To investigate genetic constraints on life-history traits, we measured standing genetic variance and covariance in 20 populations of the invasive plant purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) sampled along a latitudinal climatic gradient in eastern North America and grown under uniform conditions in a glasshouse. Genetic variances within and among populations were significant for all traits; however, strong intercorrelations among measurements of seedling growth rate, time to reproductive maturity and adult size suggested that fitness trade-offs have constrained population divergence. Evidence to support this hypothesis was obtained from the genetic variance-covariance matrix (G) and the matrix of (co)variance among population means (D), which were 79.8% (95% C.I. 77.7-82.9%) similar. These results suggest that population divergence during invasive spread of L. salicaria in eastern North America has been constrained by strong genetic correlations among life-history traits, despite large amounts of standing genetic variation for individual traits.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available