EvoLunch Seminar: Clementine Lasne (Institute of Science and Technology Austria)

Life in variable environments requires sophisticated mechanisms enabling organisms to cope with challenging living conditions. Phenotypic plasticity – the ability for a same genotype/organism to produce several phenotypes in response to changes in their surrounding conditions – can help organisms mitigate the impact of unfavourable environmental changes. But what does it mean when phenotypic plasticity occurs in the absence of environmental variability? I will present you the phenotypic data that led us to make this hypothesis, what we see/do not see at the gene expression level, and some population demography modelling that we are using to explore under which environmental scenario diversified bet-hedging could be favoured over phenotypic plasticity alone.