What is it about?
When animals evolve, they don't just change themselves—they also change the environment for future generations. How do these changes to the environment influence evolution? We evolved fruit flies in the lab for increased fighting while manipulating their social environments. By watching evolution happen in action, we showed that evolutionary changes to the social environment can make evolution speed up or slow down, even when selection and everything else is the same.
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Why is it important?
Our work shows that even small behaviors, like how flies respond to fighting, can significantly steer the course of evolution. Evolutionary feedbacks aren’t just theory—they’re powerful forces shaping populations. Our work supports the enhanced use of evolutionary feedbacks theory in diverse applications, such as conservation, farm animal welfare, and population dynamics.
Perspectives
For this experiment we had to watch nearly 40,000 fruit fly males fight each other! It was worth it to see theory come to life in real evolving populations under controlled conditions. Thanks to NSF support, we were able to employ 3 full time researchers, 1 graduate student, and 10 undergraduate students. I hope this work is helpful, especially to folks working in wild animals and applied uses of evolutionary feedbacks!
Julia Saltz
Rice University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evolutionary feedbacks for
Drosophila
aggression revealed through experimental evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2419068122.
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