Field evidence for a rapid adaptive plastic response in morphology and growth of littoral and pelagic brook charr: A reciprocal transplant experiment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Phenotypic plasticity, a process by which individuals modify their morphology, physiology, or behaviour in response to environmental changes, can be seen as the first step in adaptive evolution. Phenotypic plasticity is adaptive if two conditions are met: (1) the phenotype is associated with an environment (plastic response) and (2) the phenotype–environment association increases individual fitness (adaptive response). Using a reciprocal transplant experiment, we tested the hypothesis that functional morphological responses are correlated with growth at two organizational levels (between and within ecotypes) in brook charr. Four‐month‐old individuals from four littoral and four pelagic families raised in the laboratory were transferred into eight littoral (3 m × 4 m × 1.5 m depth) and eight pelagic (3 m × 4 m × 6 m depth) lake enclosures for a period of 12 weeks. Fin length (the main discriminant trait of the littoral and pelagic ecotypes) was less plastic than body shape. Growth was higher in the pelagic than in the littoral habitat, but offspring from littoral and pelagic parental origins did not experience higher growth in their respective habitats (comparison between ecotypes). The body shape of most individuals transplanted to their reciprocal environment shifted toward the form expected in that environment. This plastic response in body shape was functionally correlated with growth within ecotypes, but only in the littoral habitat. Furthermore, the within‐ecotype variance of both morphological traits and growth were higher in the littoral than in the pelagic habitat. Small phenotypic differences could have direct consequences on fitness in the less favourable habitat, inducing higher inter‐individual variance in growth and stronger phenotype–growth associations. We suggest that phenotypic accommodation and cryptic genetic variation, two mechanisms previously proposed as mechanisms involved in distinct situations, could be simultaneously involved to hasten the process of adaptive evolution in an unfavourable environment. A plain language summary is available for this article.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".