Céline Teplitsky

• PhD
• Researcher at Centre d'Écologie Fonctionnelle et Évolutive, French National Centre for Scientific Research

Parasites play a significant role in the evolution of their hosts, influencing a wide range of traits, including animal signals such as coloration. While the direct effects of parasitism on coloration are well-documented, it remains unclear whether these effects persist beyond the parasitized phase, leading to direct carry-over effects. Additionall...

Parasites play a significant role in the evolution of their hosts, influencing a wide range of traits, including animal signals such as coloration. While the direct effects of parasitism on coloration are well-documented, it remains unclear whether these effects persist beyond the parasitized phase, leading to direct carry-over effects. Additionall...

Urbanization is occurring globally at an unprecedented rate and, despite the eco-evolutionary importance of individual variation, we still have limited insight on how phenotypic variation is modified by anthropogenic environmental change. Urbanization can increase individual differences in some contexts, but whether this is generalizable to behavio...

Phenotypic plasticity is the key adaptive mechanism behind annual adjustment of breeding time in response to temperature. In nature, organisms are not only subjected to variation in temperature but encounter multiple fluctuating environmental factors that affect phenotypic expression, including conspecific density, which affects individual performa...

Phenological plasticity—the ability of organisms to adjust breeding timing in response to environmental variability —is the primary mechanism for seasonal organisms as it enables to synchronize their life cycles with seasonal resource availability. Theory predicts that phenological plasticity should vary among populations because of environmental h...

Senescence is ubiquitous yet highly variable among species, populations, and individuals, for reasons that are poorly understood. It is not clear how environmental conditions affect senescence, especially in the wild. We explored the influence of environment on the degree of laying date age-specific variation and reproductive success senescence in...

Phenological adjustment is the first line of adaptive response of vertebrates when seasonality is disrupted by climate change. The prevailing response is to reproduce earlier in warmer springs, but habitat changes, such as forest degradation, are expected to affect phenological plasticity, for example, due to loss of reliability of environmental cu...

Urbanization is occurring globally at an unprecedented rate and, despite the eco-evolutionary importance of individual variation, we still have limited insight on how phenotypic variation is modified by anthropogenic environmental change. Urbanization can increase individual differences in some contexts, but whether this is generalizable to behavio...

When the notion of climate change emerged over 200 years ago, few speculated as to the impact of rising atmospheric temperatures on biological life. Tens of decades later, research clearly demonstrates that the impact of climate change on life on Earth is enormous, ongoing, and with foreseen effects lasting well into the next century. Responses to...

Short-term adaptive evolution represents one of the primary mechanisms allowing species to persist in the face of global change. Predicting the adaptive response at the species level requires reliable estimates of the evolutionary potential of traits involved in adaptive responses, as well as understanding how evolutionary potential varies across a...

Biological invasions offer particularly convenient situations to study phenotypic evolution in natural populations. In particular, the comparison of derived, invasive populations with ancestral extant populations allows to investigate the relative impact of neutral demographic events, genetic constraints and selection on the evolution of phenotypes...

Predicting if, when, and how populations can adapt to climate change constitutes one of the greatest challenges in science today. Here, we build from contributions to the special issue on evolutionary adaptation to climate change, a survey of its authors, and recent literature to explore the limits and opportunities for predicting adaptive response...

Phenological adjustment is the first line of adaptive response of vertebrates when ancestral seasonality is disrupted by climate change. The prevailing response is to reproduce earlier in warmer springs, but habitat changes, such as conversion of ancestral (pre-human) habitats into cities and agricultural lands, are expected to affect phenological...

Phenotypic integration can be defined as the patterns and strength of the covariances between traits in an organism. The pace of life syndrome (POLS) hypothesis provides a testable case of phenotypic integration as it predicts that traits that mediate the trade-off between current and future reproduction should have coevolved with the slow-fast lif...

The slow-fast continuum is a commonly used framework to describe variation in life-history strategies across species. Individual life histories have also been assumed to follow a similar pattern, especially in the pace-of-life syndrome literature. However, whether a slow-fast continuum commonly explains life-history variation among individuals with...

In the context of rapid climate change, phenological advance is a key adaptation for which evidence is accumulating across taxa. Among vertebrates, phenotypic plasticity is known to underlie most of this phenological change, while evidence for micro-evolution is very limited and challenging to obtain. In this study, we quantified phenotypic and gen...

Climate change has been shown to affect fitness-related traits in a wide range of taxa; for instance, warming leads to phenological advancements in many plant and animal species. The influence of climate change on social and secondary sexual traits, that are associated with fitness due to their role as quality signals, is however unknown. Here, we...

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...

Temporal correlations among demographic parameters can strongly influence population dynamics. Our empirical knowledge, however, is very limited regarding the direction and the magnitude of these correlations and how they vary among demographic parameters and species’ life histories. Here, we use long‐term demographic data from 15 bird and mammal s...

Life‐history strategies differ with respect to investment in current versus ‘future’ reproduction, but when is this future? Under the novel ‘temporality in reproductive investment hypothesis’, we postulate variation should exist in the time frame over which reproductive costs are paid. Slow‐paced individuals should pay reproductive costs over short...

Climate change has been shown to affect fitness-related traits in a wide range of taxa; for instance, warming leads to phenological advancements in many plant and animal species. The influence of climate change on social and secondary sexual traits, that are associated with fitness due to their role as quality signals, is however unknown. Here, we...

An increasing number of empirical studies aim to quantify individual variation in demographic parameters because these patterns are key for evolutionary and ecological processes. Advanced approaches to estimate individual heterogeneity are now using a multivariate normal distribution with correlated individual random effects to account for the late...

Earlier phenology induced by climate change, such as the passerines’ breeding time, is observed in many natural populations. Understanding the nature of such changes is key to predict the responses of wild populations to climate change. Genetic changes have been rarely investigated for laying date, though it has been shown to be heritable and under...

Although it has been shown that phenology can respond to temporal environmental variation in free ranging populations of several species, little is known about the mechanisms of these responses and their effects on demography, and in particular on survival. Exploring phenological responses and their associated consequences on survival can be achiev...

Life‐history traits are often plastic in response to environmental factors such as temperature or precipitation, and they also vary with age in many species. Trait variation during the lifetime could thus be partly driven by age‐dependent plasticity in these traits. We study whether plasticity of a phenological trait—the egg‐laying date—with respec...

The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long-term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild...

Linear mixed‐effects models are powerful tools for analysing complex datasets with repeated or clustered observations, a common data structure in ecology and evolution. Mixed‐effects models involve complex fitting procedures and make several assumptions, in particular about the distribution of residual and random effects. Violations of these assump...

Early‐life conditions can have long‐lasting effects and organisms that experience a poor start in life are often expected to age at a faster rate. Alternatively, individuals raised in high‐quality environments can overinvest in early‐reproduction resulting in rapid ageing. Here we use a long‐term experimental manipulation of early‐life conditions i...

Biological responses to climate change have been widely documented across taxa and regions, but it remains unclear whether species are maintaining a good match between phenotype and environment, i.e. whether observed trait changes are adaptive. Here we reviewed 10,090 abstracts and extracted data from 71 studies reported in 58 relevant publications...

There is now overwhelming evidence that the recent rapid climate change has multiple consequences for birds: their abilities to adapt to climate change is thus a major issue. To understand the evolutionary consequences of climate change, an assessment of how it alters selection pressures is needed. As expected, climate change increases selection fo...

Early-life conditions can have long-lasting effects and organisms that experience a poor start in life are often expected to age at a faster rate. Alternatively, individuals raised in high-quality environments can overinvest in early-reproduction resulting in rapid ageing. Here we use a long-term experimental manipulation of early-life conditions i...

Phenotypic plasticity is a major mechanism of response to global change. However, current plastic responses will only remain adaptive under future conditions if informative environmental cues are still available. We briefly summarize current knowledge of the evolutionary origin and mechanistic underpinnings of environmental cues for phenotypic plas...

Although there are many examples of contemporary directional selection, evidence for responses to selection that match predictions are often missing in quantitative genetic studies of wild populations. This is despite the presence of genetic variation and selection pressures - theoretical prerequisites for the response to selection. This conundrum...

The sixth Wild Animal Models Bi-Annual Meeting was held in July 2017 in Québec, with 42 participants. This report documents the evolution of questions asked and approaches used in evolutionary quantitative genetic studies of wild populations in recent decades, and how these questions and approaches were represented at the recent meeting. We explore...

Body size is implicated in individual fitness and population dynamics. Mounting interest is being given to the effects of environmental change on body size, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We tested whether body size and body condition are related to ambient temperature (heat maintenance hypothesis), or/and explained by variati...

Divorce (mate switching) is widely considered an adaptive strategy that female birds use to improve their reproductive success. However, in few species are the causes and consequences of divorce well understood, and the genetic basis and inheritance of divorce have never been explored. In Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis) breeding on Ke...

Observed phenotypic responses to selection in the wild often differ from predictions based on measurements of selection and genetic variance. An overlooked hypothesis to explain this paradox of stasis is that a skewed phenotypic distribution affects natural selection and evolution. We show through mathematical modelling that, when a trait selected...

The genetic variance–covariance matrix (G-matrix) summarizes the genetic architecture of multiple traits. It has a central role in the understanding of phenotypic divergence and the quantification of the evolutionary potential of populations. Laboratory experiments have shown that G-matrices can vary rapidly under divergent selective pressures. How...

Because specialist species evolved in more temporally and spatially homogeneous environments than generalist species, they are supposed to experience less fluctuating selection. For this reason, we expect specialists to show lower overall genetic variation as compared to generalists. We also expect populations from specialist species to be smaller...

The field of biodiversity conservation has recently been criticised as relying on a fixist view of the living world, in which existing species constitute the targets of conservation efforts and simultaneously static states of reference, which is in apparent disagreement with evolutionary dynamics. Here, we argue that the ethical and theoretical fra...

The recent trend for journals to require open access to primary data included in publications has been embraced by many biologists, but has caused apprehension amongst researchers engaged in long-term ecological and evolutionary studies. A worldwide survey of 73 principal investigators (Pls) with long-term studies revealed positive attitudes toward...

The recent trend for journals to require open access to primary data included in publications has been embraced by many biologists, but has caused apprehension amongst researchers engaged in long-term ecological and evolutionary studies. A worldwide survey of 73 principal investigators (Pls) with long-term studies revealed positive attitudes toward...

Despite recent acknowledgement that senescence can have negative impact on survival and fertility in natural environments across a wide range of animal species, we still do not know if it can reduce the viability of wild endangered populations. Focusing on actuarial senescence (i.e., the decline of survival probabilities at old ages), we use specie...

Do all traits within an organism age for the same reason? Evolutionary theories of aging share a common assumption: the strength of natural selection declines with age. A corollary is that additive genetic variance should increase with age. However, not all senescent traits display such increases suggesting that other mechanisms may be at play. Usi...

Although senescence has been described for various fitness components in a wide range of animal species, few studies have studied senescence in long-lived species, and little is known about its interactions with environmental variation. Using a 32 year capture-mark-recapture dataset on the griffon vulture Gyps fulvus, we examined the demographic pa...

Captive breeding for conservation purposes presents a serious practical challenge because several conflicting genetic processes (i.e. inbreeding depression, random genetic drift and genetic adaptation to captivity) need to be managed in concert to maximize captive population persistence and reintroduction success probability. Because current geneti...

Background/Question/Methods Global environmental change represents a major threat to biodiversity today. The habitats of species are being modified at a fast rate, raising an important question: will populations manage to adapt to the new conditions? One strong constraint on microevolutionary responses is the fact that traits within an organism a...

In a rapidly changing world, it is of fundamental importance to understand processes constraining or facilitating adaptation through microevolution. As different traits of an organism covary, genetic correlations are expected to affect evolutionary trajectories. However, only limited empirical data are available. We investigate the extent to which...

This book gathers the expertise of thirty evolutionary biologists from around the globe to highlight how applying the field of quantitative genetics (the analysis of the genetic basis of complex traits) to wild populations has provided major advancements in evolutionary ecology. It offers insights into the relevant methods and major discoveries in...

Supportive breeding is one of the last resort conservation strategies to avoid species extinction. Management of captive populations is challenging because several harmful genetic processes need to be avoided. Several recommendations have been proposed to limit these deleterious effects, but empirical assessments of these strategies remain scarce....

Climate change is expected to induce many ecological and evolutionary changes. Among these is the hypothesis that climate warming will cause a reduction in body size. This hypothesis stems from Bergmann's rule, a trend whereby species exhibit a smaller body size in warmer climates, and larger body size under colder conditions in endotherms. The mec...

Lower visibility of female scientists, compared to male scientists, is a potential reason for the under-representation of women among senior academic ranks. Visibility in the scientific community stems partly from presenting research as an invited speaker at organized meetings. We analysed the sex ratio of presenters at the European Society for Evo...

Supplementary Methods S1.

Melanin is the main pigment in animal coloration and considerable variation in the concentrations of the two melanin forms (pheo- and eumlanin) in pigmented tissues exists among populations and individuals. Melanin-based coloration is receiving increasing attention particularly in socio-sexual communication contexts because the melanocortin system...

The investment into extravagant sexual display and competitive sperm are two essential components of pre‐ and post‐copulatory sexual selection. Even though the selective forces acting on sexual display and sperm characteristics have been extensively studied in recent years, the genetic architecture underlying the expression of these traits has been...

Adjusting breeding phenology to climate fl uctuations can be problematic for migratory birds as they have to account for local environmental conditions on the breeding grounds while migrating from remote wintering areas. Predicting general responses to climate change is not straightforward, because these responses vary between migrant species due t...

Except for cooperative breeders, most studies on wild birds have failed to find evidence for inbreeding avoidance via kin discriminative mate choice. This, together with evidence for kin avoidance through dispersal, has led to the general view that dispersal is often a sufficient inbreeding avoidance mechanism and active discrimination through mate...

Migration is a complex trait although little is known about genetic correlations between traits involved in such migration syndromes. To assess the migratory responses to climate change, we need information on genetic constraints on evolutionary potential of arrival dates in migratory birds. Using two long-term data sets on barn swallows Hirundo ru...

There is growing evidence of changes in the timing of important ecological events, such as flowering in plants and reproduction in animals, in response to climate change, with implications for population decline and biodiversity loss. Recent work has shown that the timing of breeding in wild birds is changing in response to climate change partly be...

Female reproductive performance can be strongly affected by male care, so that breeding time, a trait expressed only by females, can be seen as one trait determined by both male and female genotypes. Animal model analyses of a 46-year study of red-billed gulls (Larus novaehollandiae scopulinus) revealed that laying date was not heritable in females...

In ectotherms, variation in life history traits among populations is common and suggests local adaptation. However, geographic variation itself is not a proof for local adaptation, as genetic drift and gene flow may also shape patterns of quantitative variation. We studied local and regional variation in means and phenotypic plasticity of larval li...

Consistently with the prediction that selection should deplete additive genetic variance (V(A)) in fitness, traits closely associated to fitness have been shown to exhibit low heritabilities (h(2)=V(A)/(V(A)+V(R))). However, empirical data from the wild indicate that this is in fact due to increased residual variance (V(R)), rather than due to decr...

Ecological responses to on-going climate change are numerous, diverse, and taxonomically widespread. However, with one exception, the relative roles of phenotypic plasticity and microevolution as mechanisms in explaining these responses are largely unknown. Several recent studies have uncovered evidence for temporal declines in mean body sizes of b...

The study of evolutionary quantitative genetics has been advanced by the use of methods developed in animal and plant breeding. These methods have proved to be very useful, but they have some shortcomings when used in the study of wild populations and evolutionary questions. Problems arise from the small size of data sets typical of evolutionary st...

Rapid climate change is likely to impose strong selection pressures on traits important for fitness, and therefore, microevolution in response to climate-mediated selection is potentially an important mechanism mitigating negative consequences of climate change. We reviewed the empirical evidence for recent microevolutionary responses to climate ch...

Disentangling environmental and genetic responses to climate change

Competition is predicted to affect the expression of inducible defenses, but because costs of behavioral and morphological antipredator defenses differ along resource gradients, its effects on defenses may depend on the traits considered. We tested the predictions from different defense models in tadpoles of the common frog Rana temporaria, which e...

Questions: How do environmental stressors affect the expression of adaptive phenotypic plasticity? Is there inter-population variation in these effects? Hypothesis: Acid stress constrains the expression of inducible defences by decreasing investment in defences or by increasing the costs of investment. Organisms originating from neutral environment...

Inducible defences have long been considered as a polyphenism opposing defended and undefended morphs. However, in nature, preys are exposed to various levels of predation risk and scale their investment in defence to actual predation risk. Still, among the traits that are involved in the defence, some are specific to one predator type while others...

Pesticides represent an important threat for natural populations. While their effects are assessed on short terms acute exposure, some of their harmful consequences may only become apparent when combined with other stressors, notably natural ones, such as predation. Here, we investigated in a laboratory experiment how exposure to a common fungicide...

Induced defences, such as the predator avoidance morphologies in amphibians, result from spatial or temporal variability in predation risk. One important component of this variability should be the difference in hunting strategies between predators. However, little is known about how specific and effective induced defences are to different types of...

The impact of multiple factors on the expression of phenotypic plasticity has been poorly studied. The simultaneous presence of factors inducing diverging responses may result either in a trade-off between the responses or in a hierarchy of responses. Inducible defenses offer a suitable model to investigate these alternatives. Inducible defenses ev...

The impact of multiple factors on the expression of phenotypic plasticity has been poorly studied. The simultaneous presence of factors inducing diverging responses may result either in a trade-off between the responses or in a hierarchy of responses. Inducible defenses offer a suitable model to investigate these alternatives. Inducible defenses ev...

The introduction of predatory species, such as fish, in amphibian breeding sites is one of the many likely causes of amphibian population decline. The existence of inducible or constitutive (permanent) defences is expected to temper the lethal effects of fish on tadpoles. According to current theories on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity, the...