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Acceleration of Drosophila subobscura evolutionary response to global warming in Europe

Nature Climate Change volume 14, pages 1101–1106 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The increasing risk of irreversible ecological transformation under global warming has boosted the need to understand the capacity of organisms to adapt to this change. Here, using a resurvey method of populations of the European fly Drosophila subobscura, we show that a known evolutionary response to global warming has accelerated in the past 20 years, in step with regional warming. This genetic response has come entirely by resorting pre-existing variation—and not from novel inversions—for tolerance to high temperature. Temperate populations are predicted to converge to the typical Mediterranean chromosomal composition by the mid-2050s, at which point this classic example of steep genetic cline will have vanished. Our results suggest that species with broad geographic ranges, large population sizes and high genetic diversity may have the evolutionary potential to cope with climate change.

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Fig. 1: The 12 European sample sites and their distribution relative to the Mediterranean–temperate climate transition zone.
Fig. 2: Five decades of D. subobscura evolutionary response to global warming in Europe.
Fig. 3: Decadal rates of equatorialward shift in temperature and inversion frequencies in Europe.
Fig. 4: Change in site decadal rate of HWe between the two sample intervals.
Fig. 5: Predicted date when temperate sites will converge on the typical Mediterranean chromosomal composition.

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Data availability

All data generated in this study are available in the main text and Supplementary Information and can be accessed via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24619629 (ref. 25). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The R code for our statistical analyses can be accessed via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24619629 (ref. 25).

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Acknowledgements

We express our special gratitude to R. B. Huey, C. Parmesan and M. C. Urban for their critical reading and insightful comments on the paper. We acknowledge the data providers in the ECA&D project (https://www.ecad.eu). We acknowledge the financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (PID2020-116789, RB-C43 and CGL2017-89160P), Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (CGL2013-42432-P) and Generalitat de Catalunya (2021-SGR-00731 and 2017SGR 1379).

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  1. Departament de Genètica i de Microbiologia, Facultat de Biociències, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Francisco Rodríguez-Trelles & Rosa Tarrío

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  1. Francisco Rodríguez-Trelles
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  2. Rosa Tarrío
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F.R.-T. conceived the study and led the data analysis and the writing of the paper with input from R.T. The two authors contributed to the survey plan, collection and processing of the samples and to interpreting the results.

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Correspondence to Francisco Rodríguez-Trelles.

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Rodríguez-Trelles, F., Tarrío, R. Acceleration of Drosophila subobscura evolutionary response to global warming in Europe. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 1101–1106 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02128-6

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