Environmental change rate and dispersion pattern modulate the dynamics of evolutionary rescue of the cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa

Abstract

The rate of biodiversity loss is so high that some scientists affirm that we are being witnesses of the sixth mass extinction. In this situation, it is necessary to ask the following question: can the organisms be able to resist the environmental changes that are taking place? Recent studies have shown the possibility of a population recovering from a stress situation through evolutionary rescue (ER) events. These events depend on the size of the population, its previous history and the rate of the environmental change. The aim of this work is to add more knowledge about the ER dynamics creating stress situations with selective agents (sulphur and salinity) and using the toxic cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa as a model organism. The experiments are based on exposing populations to severe stress and analyze the effect of previous dispersal events and deterioration rates on the occurrence of ER events among populations. The model consists in three different rates of environmental change (constant, slow and fast; under salinity stress we only used the first two treatments) and three dispersal models (isolated, local or global). In total, 324 and 720 populations were exposed to stressful conditions caused by sulphur and salinity, respectively. The results showed that the dispersal modes and the environmental deterioration rates modulated the occurrence of ER events. It has been observed that dispersal favours ER events for both selective agents. Regarding the rate of environmental change, we observed an increase of ER events under constant changes in the populations exposed to sulphur stress. However, ER events were higher when there was previous deterioration (i.e., slow environmental change rate) under saline stress. As a conclusion, ER events in M. aeruginosa depend on selective agent, being the probability higher for salinity than for sulphur. Thus, it could be hypothesized that general conclusions in ER studies must take into account the selective agent.