BU Researcher Exploring Adaptability to Environmental Conditions

Did You Know…?

What can Eastern chipmunks and pre-industrial humans living in Quebec, born between 1608 and 1750, tell us about living beings’ ability to adapt to their environment? Quite a bit, actually!

Living beings can adapt to environmental conditions experienced over a lifetime. However, in the context of rapid climate change, these adaptations may quickly become obsolete.

Dr. Patrick Bergeron of the Department of Biological Sciences has recently received a grant in the amount of $120,000 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada to study and understand the ecological causes and the evolutionary consequences of variations in living beings’ life-history strategies.

His study of Eastern chipmunks will allow him to verify if short-term environmental variations (for examples, whether beech trees will or will not mast, that is, produce seeds, in a given year) can affect certain essential traits, such as reproduction, dispersal, personality, metabolism, and survival. (Hint: the answer is yes!)

Studying pre-industrial human populations will allow him to see if environmental conditions experienced as an infant (ex. Solar irradiance reconstructed from the observation of sun spots at the time) can have carry-over effects later in life and leave a footprint on a population’s demography. (Again: yes!)

Why is this important? We live in a country that is currently facing exceptionally high rates of environmental variation. There are plenty of long-term studies that track evolutionary changes of a population over time but lack details on individuals, and still others, carried out in the short term, that track individuals over their life-time, but do not incorporate an evolutionary, multi-generational perspective. Dr. Bergeron’s innovative research program aims to combine both perspectives in order to generate a more complete picture of variations in life-history strategies.