Alexis Rutschmann

Station d’Ecologie Expérimentale à Moulis | ECOEX

The shape and intensity of natural selection can vary between years, potentially resulting in a chronic reduction of fitness as individuals need to track a continually changing optimum of fitness (i.e., a “lag load”). In endangered species, often characterized by small population size, the lack of genetic diversity is expected to limit the response...

Aging is the price to pay for acquiring and processing energy through cellular activity and life history productivity. Climate warming can exacerbate the inherent pace of aging, as illustrated by a faster erosion of protective telomere DNA sequences. This biomarker integrates individual pace of life and parental effects through the germline, but wh...

The rate of adaptive evolution, the contribution of selection to genetic changes that increase mean fitness, is determined by the additive genetic variance in individual relative fitness. To date, there are few robust estimates of this parameter for natural populations, and it is therefore unclear whether adaptive evolution can play a meaningful ro...

Climate-modulated parasitism is driven by a range of factors, yet the spatial and temporal variability of this relationship has received scant attention in wild vertebrate hosts. Moreover, most prior studies overlooked the intraspecific differences across host morphotypes, which impedes a full understanding of the climate-parasitism relationship. I...

Movements of individuals are conditioned by information acquisition coming from either personal or social sources. Yet, little is known about the processes used by individuals to make movement decisions when facing multiple sources of social information simultaneously. This study aimed to test experimentally how social information from multiple sou...

Reversing the decline of threatened species is a target for the Convention on Biological Diversity but current efforts are failing. An integrative, multi-stakeholder approach to species conservation planning, which includes population viability analyses and both in situ and ex situ management consideration, could improve outcomes for some of the mo...

1. In the past decades, nocturnal temperatures have been playing a disproportionate role in the global warming of the planet. Yet, they remain a neglected factor in studies assessing the impact of global warming on natural populations. 2. Here, we question whether an intense augmentation of nocturnal temperatures is beneficial or deleterious to ect...

Behavioral thermoregulation is an efficient mechanism to buffer the physiological effects of climate change. Thermal ecology studies have traditionally tested how thermal constraints shape thermoregulatory behaviors without accounting for the potential major effects of landscape structure and water availability. Thus, we lack a general understandin...

In heterogeneous habitats, individuals sharing a larger part of their home-range are also likely to live in a very similar environment. This ‘common environment’ effect can generate phenotypic similarities between neighbours and lead to the structuring of phenotypes through the habitat. In this study, we used an intensely monitored population of hi...

Regulation of body temperature is crucial for optimizing physiological performance in ectotherms but imposes constraints in time and energy. Time and energy spent thermoregulating can be reduced through behavioral (e.g., basking adjustments) or biophysical (e.g., heating rate physiology) means. In a heterogeneous environment, we expect thermoregula...

Background: Hosts and their parasites are under reciprocal selection, leading to coevolution. However, parasites depend not only on a host, but also on the host's environment. In addition, a single host species is rarely infested by a single species of parasite and often supports multiple species (i.e., multi-infestation). Although the arms race b...

Threatened species face numerous threats, including future challenges triggered by global change. A possible way to cope with these challenges is through adaptive evolution, which requires adaptive potential. Adaptive potential is defined as the genetic variance needed to respond to selection and can be assessed either on adaptive traits or fitness...

Many bird species have been observed shifting their laying date to earlier in the year in response to climate change. However the vast majority of these studies were performed on non‐threatened species, less impacted by reduced genetic diversity (which is expected to limit evolutionary response) as a consequence of genetic bottlenecks, drift and po...

1.Climate change should lead to massive loss of biodiversity in most taxa but the detailed physiological mechanisms underlying population extinction remain largely elusive so far. In vertebrates, baseline levels of hormones such as glucocorticoids (GCs) may be indicators of population state since their secretion to chronic stress can impair surviva...

Identifying the early warning signals of catastrophic extinctions has recently became a central focus for ecologists, but species’ functional responses to environmental changes remain an untapped source for the sharpening of such warning signals. Telomere length (TL) analysis represents a promising molecular tool with which to raise the alarm regar...

Water-conservation strategies are well documented in species living in water-limited environments, but physiological adaptations to water availability in temperate climate environments are still relatively overlooked. Yet, temperate species are facing more frequent and intense droughts as a result of climate change. Here, we examined variation in f...

Life-history traits involved in trade-offs are known to vary with environmental conditions. Here, we evaluate the response of the trade-off between 'offspring number' versus 'energy invested per offspring' to ambient temperature in 11 natural populations of the common lizard, Zootoca vivipara. We provide evidence at both the intra-and interpopulati...

1.Substantial plastic variation in phenology in response to environmental heterogeneity through time in the same population has been uncovered in many species. However, our understanding of differences in reaction norms of phenology among populations from a given species remains limited. 2.Since the plasticity of phenological traits is often influe...

Concerns are rising about the capacity of species to adapt quickly enough to climate change. In long-lived organisms such as trees, genetic adaptation is slow, and how much phenotypic plasticity can help them cope with climate change remains largely unknown. Here we assess whether, where and when phenological plasticity is and will be adaptive in t...

High propagule pressure is arguably the only consistent predictor of colonization success. More individuals enhance colonization success because they aid in overcoming demographic consequences of small population size (e.g. stochasticity and Allee effects). The number of founders can also have direct genetic effects: with fewer individuals, more in...