Biology subjects

Tung, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Tung, S..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2017

Evolution of dispersal syndrome and its corresponding metabolomic changes

Dispersal is one of the strategies for organisms to deal with climate change and habitat degradation. Therefore, investigating the effects of dispersal evolution on natural populations is of considerable interest to ecologists and conservation biologists. Although it is known that dispersal itself can evolve due to selection, the behavioral, life-history and metabolic consequences of dispersal evolution are not well understood. Here we explore these issues by subjecting four outbred laboratory populations of Drosophila melanogaster to selection for increased dispersal. The dispersal-selected populations had similar values of body size, fecundity and longevity as the non-selected lines (controls), but evolved significantly greater locomotor activity, exploratory tendency, and aggression. Untargeted metabolomic fingerprinting through NMR spectroscopy suggested that the selected flies evolved elevated cellular respiration characterized by greater amounts of glucose, AMP and NAD. Concurrent evolution of higher level of Octopamine and other neurotransmitters indicate a possible mechanism for the behavioural changes in the selected lines. We discuss the generalizability of our findings in the context of observations from natural populations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of the evolution of metabolome due to selection for dispersal and its connection to dispersal syndrome evolution.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2017

Pre-dispersal conditions and presence of opposite sex modulate density dependence and sex bias of dispersal

Density-dependent dispersal (DDD) has been demonstrated in many species and has several ecological and evolutionary consequences. Yet we know little about how robust DDD is to the various conditions experienced by individuals. In this study, we use three independent experiments on laboratory populations of Drosophila melanogaster to examine the effects of pre-dispersal adult density, sex of the dispersers and presence of mates on the robustness of DDD patterns. We show that DDD can be greatly affected by both pre-dispersal density and interaction between the sexes. Moreover, the direction of sex-biased dispersal can reverse completely due to an interaction between the pre-dispersal and dispersal densities. We also show that interaction between the sexes can lead to negative DDD at the population level, even if, by themselves, neither sex exhibits DDD. Finally, we discuss potential implications of our results for processes like evolutionary rescue from extinctions and genetic divergence of populations.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2017

Understanding The Dynamics Of Laboratory Populations Of Drosophila melanogaster: Long-Term Experiments Meet Individual-Based Modelling

The dynamics of stage-structured populations facing variability in resource availability and/or demographic factors like unequal sex-ratios, remains poorly understood. We addressed these issues using a stage-structured individual-based model that incorporates life-history parameters common to many holometabolous insects. The model was calibrated using time series data from a 49-generation experiment on laboratory populations of Drosophila melanogaster, subjected to four different combinations of larval and adult nutritional levels. The model was able to capture multiple qualitative and quantitative aspects of the empirical time series across three independent studies. We then simulated the model to explore the interaction of various life-history parameters and nutritional levels in determining population stability. In all nutritional regimes, stability of the populations was reduced upon increasing egg-hatchability, critical mass and proportion of body resource allocated to female fecundity. However, the stability-effects of increasing sensitivity of female-fecundity to adult density varied across nutrition regimes. The effects of unequal sex-ratio and sex-specific culling were greatly influenced by fecundity but not by levels of juvenile nutrition. Finally, we investigated the implications of some of these insights on the efficiency of the widely-used pest control method, Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). We show that increasing the amount of juvenile food had no effects on SIT efficiency when the density-independent fecundity is low, but reduces SIT efficiency when the density-independent fecundity is high.

ecology↗