CAREER: Linking microevolution to macroevolution using a high resolution, long term fossil stickleback dataset

Loyola University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). Can biologists use current knowledge of populations and the forces acting on them to help predict long-term outcomes of evolution? To answer this question, PI Stuart will study 20,000 years of evolution in a fossilized lineage of Three spine Stickleback fish (Gasterosteus doryssus). Stuart will measure characteristics of the early population and test whether that information allows one to predict the evolution observed by the end of the population’s trajectory. Being able to make predictions about evolution is highly relevant as it relates to pandemic forecasting, the design of medicines for infectious disease and cancer, as well as predicting how agriculture and agricultural pests will respond to human activity. As such, this project has relevance to national health, prosperity, and welfare. Using a museum collection of fossil G. doryssus, Stuart will measure 19 anatomical traits from ~4,500 fish sampled at a continuity, resolution, and length of time rarely available in studies of living or extinct species. Because Stuart is observing evolution directly in a single lineage through time, the ancestral form is known. Thus, Stuart can better ask about rates of evolutionary change, how selection shaped evolutionary trends, how ancestral trait correlations constrained evolution, and whether a constraint itself evolved. This study organism has the added strength of being a stickleback and part of a family whose evolution, ecology, genetics, and development have been thoroughly studied in living populations. As such, Stuart can place observed change in G. doryssus into a broader biological context to better answer whether macroevolution is microevolution predictably writ large. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.