Interactions between thermal and nutritional stress reveal cryptic adaptive potential
- 1University of Tasmania
Abstract
Predicting whether populations can adapt fast enough to persist under global change requires understanding how adaptive potential changes with the environment. Theory predicts that cryptic genetic variation hidden under benign conditions may be released under stress, but empirical tests are rare and typically manipulate single stressors in isolation, which is not realistic under global change. Using a quantitative genetic breeding design with Drosophila melanogaster, we quantified additive genetic variance in fitness (female productivity) across combinations of temperature and nutritional stress. We found that nutritional stress increased genetic variance at cold and hot margins. Temperature and diet also interacted to shape which genotypes performed best: nutritional stress weakened genetic correlations across temperatures at the hot margin, whereas genetic correlations across diets strengthened at the cold margin. Adaptive potential is therefore environment-dependent and multidimensional, meaning single stressor experiments are likely to systematically misrepresent adaptive capacity under realistic global change scenarios.
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BibTeX
@misc{walter2026interactions,
title = {{Interactions between thermal and nutritional stress reveal cryptic adaptive potential}},
author = {G. M. Walter and A. Chakraborty and L. A. Yates and F. Cockerell and C. White and C. Sgro},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.18.759992},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.18.759992v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Interactions between thermal and nutritional stress reveal cryptic adaptive potential
AU - G. M. Walter
AU - A. Chakraborty
AU - L. A. Yates
AU - F. Cockerell
AU - C. White
AU - C. Sgro
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/18
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.18.759992
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.18.759992v1
AB - Predicting whether populations can adapt fast enough to persist under global change requires understanding how adaptive potential changes with the environment. Theory predicts that cryptic genetic variation hidden under benign conditions may be released under stress, but empirical tests are rare and typically manipulate single stressors in isolation, which is not realistic under global change. Using a quantitative genetic breeding design with Drosophila melanogaster, we quantified additive genetic variance in fitness (female productivity) across combinations of temperature and nutritional stress. We found that nutritional stress increased genetic variance at cold and hot margins. Temperature and diet also interacted to shape which genotypes performed best: nutritional stress weakened genetic correlations across temperatures at the hot margin, whereas genetic correlations across diets strengthened at the cold margin. Adaptive potential is therefore environment-dependent and multidimensional, meaning single stressor experiments are likely to systematically misrepresent adaptive capacity under realistic global change scenarios.
ER -