Skip to main content
2023 ESA Annual Meeting Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Back

Contributed Talk

Session: : Aquatic Ecology: Lakes And Ponds 2

COS 71-2 - Phenotypically plastic responses to pesticides and road salts: Naïve tolerance, induced tolerance, and consequences for life history and pathogen tolerance

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
10:15 AM – 10:30 AM PDT
Location: B111
Abstract: Ecosystems around the world are being impacted by numerous stressors due to human activities. While natural stressors (e.g., predators, herbivores, competitors) commonly favor the evolution of induced responses that are adaptive—often with associated costs—we know much less about induced responses to human-caused stressors including contaminants. Using 9–15 populations of larval amphibians in several experiments, we examined their naïve (i.e. baseline) tolerance and cross-tolerance to three commonly applied insecticides (carbaryl, chlorpyrifos, and diazinon) and their naïve tolerance to road salt (NaCl). We then examined each population’s ability to induce increased tolerance following sublethal exposures to each anthropogenic stressor. We discovered substantial population-level variation in naïve tolerance to both pesticides and road salt. Moreover, we discovered that induced tolerance to all stressors was pervasive, but the magnitude differed greatly among populations. We also found that induced tolerance to salinization exhibited no cost of slower growth or development. However, the populations did show differing susceptibilities to multiple pathogens (e.g., chytrid fungus, trematodes, ranavirus) in the absence of the chemicals. Collectively, these data suggest that the ability to evolve induced tolerances to pollutants (and other human impacts) may be pervasive across species, thereby motivating a major area of new research in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.