Indirect evolutionary rescue: prey adapts, predator avoids extinction.

ABSTRACT: Recent studies have increasingly recognized evolutionary rescue (adaptive evolution that prevents extinction following environmental change) as an important process in evolutionary biology and conservation science. Researchers have concentrated on single species living in isolation, but populations in nature exist within communities of interacting species, so evolutionary rescue should also be investigated in a multispecies context. We argue that the persistence or extinction of a focal species can be determined solely by evolutionary change in an interacting species. We demonstrate that prey adaptive evolution can prevent predator extinction in two-species predator-prey models, and we derive the conditions under which this indirect evolutionary interaction is essential to prevent extincti

SUBMITTER: Yamamichi M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4561568 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature