Metabolic phenotype mediates the outcome of competitive interactions in a response-surface field experiment.

Competition and metabolism should be linked. Intraspecific variation in metabolic rates and, hence, resource demands covary with competitive ability. The effects of metabolism on conspecific interactions, however, have mostly been studied under laboratory conditions.

Effects of embryo energy, egg size, and larval food supply on the development of asteroid echinoderms.

Organisms have limited resources available to invest in reproduction, causing a trade-off between the number and size of offspring. One consequence of this trade-off is the evolution of disparate egg sizes and, by extension, developmental modes. In particular, echinoid echinoderms (sea urchins and sand dollars) have been widely used to experimentally manipulate how changes in egg size affect development.

Biochemical evolution in response to intensive harvesting in algae: Evolution of quality and quantity.

Evolutionary responses to indirect selection pressures imposed by intensive harvesting are increasingly common. While artificial selection has shown that biochemical components can show rapid and dramatic evolution, it remains unclear as to whether intensive harvesting can inadvertently induce changes in the biochemistry of harvested populations. For applications such as algal culture, many of the desirable bioproducts could evolve in response to harvesting, reducing cost-effectiveness, but experimental tests are lacking.

The other 96%: Can neglected sources of fitness variation offer new insights into adaptation to global change?

Mounting research considers whether populations may adapt to global change based on additive genetic variance in fitness. Yet selection acts on phenotypes, not additive genetic variance alone, meaning that persistence and evolutionary potential in the near term, at least, may be influenced by other sources of fitness variation, including nonadditive genetic and maternal environmental effects. The fitness consequences of these effects, and their environmental sensitivity, are largely unknown.

Global change, life-history complexity and the potential for evolutionary rescue.

Most organisms have complex life cycles, and in marine taxa, larval life-history stages tend to be more sensitive to environmental stress than adult (reproductive) life-history stages. While there are several models of stage-specific adaptation across the life history, the extent to which differential sensitivity to environmental stress (defined here as reductions in absolute fitness across the life history) affects the tempo of adaptive evolution to change remains unclear. We used a heuristic model to explore how commonly observed features associated with marine complex life histories alter a population's capacity to cope with environmental change.