ORCC: Evaluating the effect of predation on thermal adaptation in response to climate change

The physical environment sets the stage for life on Earth. Key components of climate such as temperature and precipitation determine what organisms can occur where, and change in those factors can drive changes in the distribution and abundance of everything from plants and insects to fish and trees. Changes in temperature, including that caused by anthropogenic inputs to the atmosphere, are now challenging organisms and changing the physical environment in which species live. It is not clear whether species can adapt to these shifts in temperature, or whether we can predict the outcomes of changing temperature. Such understanding and ability to forecast the consequences of climate change, however, are important because climate change could undermine the provisioning of ecosystem services, such as the production of harvestable fish, or promote the emergence of economically important species, such as agricultural pests or mosquitos. These processes depend, in part, on adaptation to changes in climate, and our ability to respond to change in time depends on our ability to anticipate the change. Our research directly examines both the question of how/whether species can respond to changing climates by adapting to different temperatures and whether we can predict such change using the most widely embraced tool in thermal ecology (the thermal performance curve). We will engage with a wide range of basic and applied researchers to critically assess the use of this tool and try to make our own predictions for the outcomes of experiments we will conduct in the laboratory. A critical question for climate change research is whether biotic interactions alter thermal performance curves (TPC) and thereby alter eco-evolutionary responses to warming. The goals of this project are to: 1) evaluate the effect of predation on the multivariate trait response underlying thermal adaptation, 2) determine how predation and thermal adaptation combine to alter predator-prey dynamics, and 3) critically evaluate the utility of TPCs as a forecasting and management tool in the context of climate change and biotic interactions. We will achieve these goals by subjecting genetically diverse populations of Paramecium spp. to predation risk and warming and measuring underlying trait and thermal niche evolution in response to these selective pressures. We will assess how this evolution affects predator-prey dynamics and evaluate whether TPCs measured at the beginning of the experiments can accurately predict the overall outcomes of our warming treatments. The experiments will evaluate the community-level consequences of evolution by evaluating how the stability of the predator-prey system changes from the initial establishment of our communities to 500 generations post-evolution. By contrasting thermal niches across genotypes and predator-prey dynamics in different climate scenarios pre- and post-evolution, the research is expected to significantly advance our understanding of how climate change interacts with predation to drive thermal adaptation and impact the stability of ecological systems. The project will advance training at the interface of data and theory, broaden research participation, and establish a working group to assess the efficacy of the TPC framework for predicting organismal responses to climate change. 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.