Saturday 9 March 2019

life history - Has there been any observation of species adapting the evolution process?


I am very interested in the evolution of the evolution process itself. There are of course a lot of things that influence how evolution will work, but for this question, I am interested in things that are only related to the evolution process. Examples could be increase chance of mutations in newborns, change in reproduction age, and similar. I am specifically interested in observation where the evolution process itself has adapted to a change in the environment.



Answer




Bacteria such as E. coli are known to increase their mutation rate (by switching to a more error prone polymerase among other things) when under stress. This can mean being placed in a medium where it's not adapted to grow (http://www.micab.umn.edu/courses/8002/Rosenberg.pdf) or when treated with antibiotics (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088971/?tool=pmcentrez).


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