A major effect of global warming is the increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, from droughts and heat waves to hurricanes and extreme winter storms.
Despite their brevity, these extreme weather events can be a major source of selection in the wild and influence the evolutionary fate of surviving populations.
Winter storm / Unsplash
In 1898, Hermon Bumpus provided the first measurement of natural selection operating on a wild population. By comparing house sparrows that survived a severe snowstorm to those that perished, he was able to directly measure selection on body size and shape.
Events like the 1898 snowstorm can result in intense episodes of rapid demographic and evolutionary change. Since that time, extreme winter events have become more extreme and much more common across the United States. However, despite advances in technology and statistics, there are still few examples of biological response to intense weather events and fewer still have investigated the genes responsible for such changes.
To help fill this gap, we studied how an extreme winter storm caused by fluctuations in the Polar Vortex (maybe an insert explaining what the Polar Vortex is) impacted green anole populations, altering the cold tolerance, gene expression and genetic variation of the surviving population.
Hurricane / Unsplash
Hurricanes are destructive forces that have drastic impacts on biodiversity over extremely short time periods, causing high mortality for many species and reshaping entire ecosystems.
According to climate change models, these events will occur more often and increase in severity in the coming decades. Therefore, it is import to understand the consequences of these extreme weather events on natural populations and biodiversity in tropical regions around the globe. We are studying functional performance, morphology, and genetic variation to gain a clearer understanding of how hurricanes influence the variation and evolution in a wide-spread and diverse neotropical adaptive radiation of lizards in the genus Anolis.
We are combining tests of high-wind clinging performance and high-precision x-ray data with quantitative genetics and genomic scans of selection in wild populations to understand how tropical storms influence the evolution of performance and morphology. This integrative approach will provide a powerful toolkit for understanding the impacts of hurricanes on species experiencing these events with greater frequency.
Understanding how these events impact wild populations may be critical for understanding the lasting biological impacts of such events and preserving biodiversity in regions that are most vulnerable to extreme weather events.
