Evolution can happen at shorter timescales, a fruit fly study shows

Context

Recently, a study on direct observation of adaptive tracking on ecological time scales in Drosophila was published.

About

Evolution process:

The study has vastly changed our understanding of evolution and questioned the old notion of evolution being a slow process occurring over a longer period of time.
We now have evidence that the change is actually happening faster than we ever thought and that not all evolution happens due to habitat destruction, invasion or pollution.
It establishes that evolutionary changes happen quickly and researchers can track these in real time — within a single seasonal turn in a year.

About the study:

Ecosystems can experience rapid environmental change but whether populations can continuously adapt to those changes is unknown.
Combining a field experiment with laboratory common garden experiments, the study observed changes in six phenotypes related to reproductive output or stress tolerance underlain by rapid, genome-wide evolution.
The direction of trait and genomic shifts changed over months, in accordance with environmental changes.
This study demonstrates the potential for rapid, continuous evolution to changing environmental conditions and highlights the importance of collecting data with a high temporal resolution for observing the effects of fluctuating selection.
The experiment focused on three key elements to study adaptive tracking in response to ongoing environmental change:
- generating highly accurate measurements of phenotypic and genomic evolution,
- taking these measurements on a time scale similar to that of natural environmental change, and
- collecting measurements from independent replicate populations experiencing similar environmental conditions

Outcomes of the study:

In understanding the field life of fruit flies a little more which will have a large impact on our basic understanding of evolution.
Biologists could better predict the future of species experiencing rapid changes in climatic variables.

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