Abstract
Understanding the ecological conditions promoting diversification of lineages has been
one of the major challenges in the field of evolutionary ecology. The ecological theory of
adaptive radiation identified two potential conditions to divergence; selection resulting
from differences between environments and from the interaction between species. So
far, the best explained factor is differences between environmental features giving rise
to divergence of lineages. Most of the other cases on adaptive radiation indicated that
resource competition is an important process underlying diversification, although the
roles of the other species interactions are not explicitly tested. Predation, for instance, is
still underexplored, despite having both ecological and evolutionary impacts on prey
populations. Role of predation on diversification remained unsettled, as field studies are
challenging and experimental studies showed its modifying effect when selection is
driven by resource competition. Importantly, the interacting effects of different
ecological processes on diversification should be evaluated in detail. The aim of this
thesis is to evaluate the importance of predation, and its effect on diversification when
predation and resource competition are both present.
The first chapter investigated the relative contributions of predation and resource
competition to diversification when they act simultaneously. In our experimental
evolution study, initially isogenic populations of bacterial prey grew either in the
presence or absence of predation in two different resource levels. We determined the
major classes of colony morphologies (i.e. morphotypes), which we observed over time
in replicate populations. Then, we used the changes in the frequency of these
morphotypes to estimate phenotypic diversity over time. We found that predation was
the main ecological process driving diversification of bacterial populations. In the
absence of predation, resource competition did not lead to diversification. Importantly,
the resource level of the environment generated an eco-evolutionary feedback. The
differences in the resource level led to differences in the number of predators per prey, which changed the strength of selection, which in the end determined the level of
diversity. As a result, the resource level of the environment had a significant
contribution to diversification in the presence of predation leading to a higher level of
prey diversity in the low resource environment. It has been challenging to disentangle the inputs of different species interactions, however, our experiment presented how the
resource level of the environment can contribute both to resource competition and
predation leading to differences in selection through eco-evolutionary feedbacks.
The second chapter aimed to understand how predation selected for different bacterial
morphotypes in environments with different resource levels. Here, we investigated
ecologically relevant phenotypic traits and measured the fitness of morphotypes in the
presence and absence of predation. We discovered that morphotypes, which were
evolved and coexisted in the low resource environment in the presence of predation,
showed clumping and cell-chaining traits. Although having these different defense
strategies, the coexisting morphotypes had similar defense levels with different
competitive abilities. These data suggested that difference in defense trait was not
solely selected by predation, but by predation in interaction with resource competition.
In the high resource environment, on the other hand, only clumping morphotypes were
found. Our data demonstrated that predation generated strong directional selection for
defense evolution favoring one defensive phenotype in the high resource environment,
where resources were abundant and resource competition was not effecting the
selection directly. This chapter provided insight into how different ecological conditions
favored different traits.
The third chapter examined the roles of ecological processes acting in our evolution
experiment on stable coexistence. We investigated the ecological mechanisms which
could potentially lead to stable coexistence of two morphotypes in the low resource
environment and in the presence of predation. By measuring the fitness of morphotypes in different ecological conditions, we showed that predation operated as an equalizing
mechanism and decreased the strength of resource competition and thus allowed
morphotypes to coexist stably. Additionally, although identifying the degree of niche
overlap experimentally is difficult in such complex ecological conditions, multiple lines
of evidence in our study supported possible niche differentiation. Specifically, we
presented potential niche differentiation by demonstrating how morphotypes differed
in ecologically relevant traits and by following their frequency over time from the early
stages of diversification on. We concluded that interacting ecological processes play an
important role in stable coexistence. Importantly, our findings highlighted the
importance of investigating both types of coexistence mechanisms, before inferring that
high degree of niche overlap limits stable coexistence.
