The ERC CLIMEVOLVE project aims at understanding evolution of thermal performance. It is investigating how rapidly and by which mechanisms fish adapt to warming water temperatures.
Climate change is one of the most severe global threats of our time. The task now facing biologists is to predict how life on earth will be affected. Ectothermic animals, whose body temperature is controlled by the environment, are particularly sensitive to warming because the rate of their biological processes is largely under environmental control. For many decades, scientists have studied how fish and other ectothermic animals adjust their physiology to better function at new temperatures. This is a reversible process within individuals called thermal acclimation, and the rates and mechanisms of thermal acclimation are partly understood. However, the process of evolutionary adaptation across generations has not been well studied in vertebrates, partly due to the difficulty of maintaining experiments across many generations. This project aims at uncovering the potential for evolutionary rescue to climate change impacts, by using three sets of evolution experiments. Two are multi-generational artificial selection experiments on zebrafish. The third is a natural evolution experiment that has taken polace on Iceland over the last thousands of years as sticklebacks have adapted to warm water in several geothermally heated lakes.
The main objectives are:
1. Understand the physiology behind warming tolerance
2. Measure how fast climate change evolution can be
3. Compare laboratory evolution experiments on zebrafish with the natural stickleback experiments
4. Discover the genetics behind climate change evolution
By answering these important questions, this project will substantially move the field of thermal biology forward. We will gain knowledge needed to understand and predict climate change impacts on fish, insights that will help focusing conservation efforts.
