Unifying ecology and evolution to understand why very large and very small species exist
Ecological changes can result in evolution of phenotypic traits and life history, which can impact population and community dynamics. These two processes interact to generate eco-evolutionary feedbacks. I will explain how we can empirically quantify and theoretically model these feedbacks by drawing on my research into the ecosystems of Yellowstone National Park and Trinidad’s freshwater streams. Although the framework I describe has had some success in linking population ecology, population genetics, life history theory, and quantitative genetics, one of the drawbacks of the approach I will describe is models can become quite complicated making them hard to analyse. I will describe a novel approach I have pioneered to simplify models to gain general, novel, ecological and evolutionary insight. I will illustrate the approach by demonstrating how to evolve both species with very large body sizes and slow life histories, and those with small body sizes and fast life histories.
Chair: Claudio Quilodran