Phillip Watts

• Professor in Evolutionary Genetics at University of Jyväskylä

Understanding how ecological, environmental and geographic features influence population genetic patterns provides crucial insights into a species' evolutionary history, as well as their vulnerability or resilience under climate change. In the Southern Ocean, population genetic variation is influenced across multiple spatial scales ranging from cir...

Overfishing is one of the greatest threats to fish populations. Size-selective harvesting favours faster juvenile growth, younger maturation, small adult body size and low reproductive output. Such changes might be slow to recover and ultimately threaten population fitness and survival. To study the recovery potential of exploited experimental popu...

High metabolic rate may provide fitness benefits for individuals. But high metabolic rates incur energetic costs and the need to ingest more food, increasing the risks of ingesting harmful substances from the environment. How organisms respond to elevated levels of ionizing radiation is an important question in the light of increasing pollution fro...

A genomic database of all Earth’s eukaryotic species could contribute to many scientific discoveries; however, only a tiny fraction of species have genomic information available. In 2018, scientists across the world united under the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), aiming to produce a database of high-quality reference genomes containing all ~1.5 mil...

Overfishing not only drastically reduces the number of fish in an exploited population but is also often selective for body size by removing the largest individuals from a population. Here, we study experimentally the evolutionary effects of size‐selective harvesting using whole‐genome sequencing on a model organism, the zebrafish (Danio rerio). We...

Many fisheries exert directional selection on traits such as body size and growth rate. Whether directional selection impacts regions of the genome associated with traits related to growth is unknown. To address this issue, we characterised copy number variation in three regions of the genome associated with cell division, (1) telomeric DNA, (2) lo...

Many fisheries exert directional selection on traits such as body size and growth rate. Whether directional selection impacts regions of the genome associated with traits related to growth is unknown. To address this issue, we characterised copy number variation in three regions of the genome associated with cell division, (1) telomeric DNA, (2) lo...

Many fisheries exert directional selection on traits such as body size and growth rate. Whether directional selection impacts regions of the genome associated with traits related to growth is unknown. To address this issue, we characterised copy number variation in three regions of the genome associated with cell division, (1) telomeric DNA, (2) lo...

The response of the gut microbiota to changes in the host environment can be influenced by both the host's past and present habitats. To quantify their contributions for two different life stages, we studied the gut microbiota of wild bank voles (Clethrionomys glareolus) by performing a reciprocal transfer experiment with adults and their newborn o...

Overharvesting is a serious threat to many fish populations. High mortality and directional selection on body size can cause evolutionary change in exploited populations via selection for a specific phenotype and a potential reduction in phenotypic diversity. Whether the loss of phenotypic diversity that accompanies directional selection impairs re...

Overharvesting is a serious threat to many fish populations. High mortality and directional selection on body size can cause evolutionary change in exploited populations via selection for a specific phenotype and a potential reduction in phenotypic diversity. Whether the loss of phenotypic diversity that accompanies directional selection impairs re...

The marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is considered vulnerable to irreversible collapse under future climate trajectories, and its tipping point may lie within the mitigated warming scenarios of 1.5° to 2°C of the United Nations Paris Agreement. Knowledge of ice loss during similarly warm past climates could resolve this uncertainty, inc...

Humans are exposed to diverse communities of microbes every day. With more time spent indoors by humans, investigations into the communities of microbes inhabiting occupied spaces have become important to deduce the impacts of these microbes on human health and building health. Studies so far have given considerable insight into the communities of...

Overfishing drives population decline, which in turn drives loss of genetic diversity. Many studies provide evidence of declines in genetic diversity; however, controversy exists within the literature, as some studies show evidence of no change in genetic diversity despite decades of overharvesting. The apparent discrepancy in the literature should...

Overfishing not only drastically reduces the number of fish in an exploited population but is often selective for body size removing the largest individuals from a population. Here, we study experimentally the evolutionary effects of size-selective harvesting using whole genome sequencing on a model organism; the zebrafish, which also allows us to...

Animals host complex bacterial communities in their gastrointestinal tracts, with which they share a mutualistic interaction. The numerous effects these interactions grant to the host include regulation of the immune system, defense against pathogen invasion, aid in digestion of otherwise indigestible foodstuffs and even changing host behaviour. St...

The marine-based West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is considered vulnerable to collapse under future climate trajectories and may even lie within the mitigated warming scenarios of 1.5–2 °C of the United Nations Paris Agreement. Knowledge of ice loss during similarly warm past climates, including the Last Interglacial period, when global sea levels w...

The relationship between genetic differentiation and phenotypic plasticity can provide information on whether plasticity generally facilitates or hinders adaptation to environmental change. Here, we studied wing shape variation in a damselfly (Lestes sponsa) across a latitudinal gradient in Europe that differed in time constraints mediated by photo...

The effects of systemic pathogens on gut microbiota of wild animals are poorly understood. Furthermore, coinfections are the norm in nature, yet most studies of pathogen–microbiota interactions focus on effects of single pathogen infections on gut microbiota. We examined the effects of four systemic pathogens (bacteria Anaplasma phagocytophilum and...

Anthropogenic changes to land use drive concomitant changes in biodiversity, including that of the soil microbiota. However, it is not clear how increasing intensity of human disturbance is reflected in the soil microbial communities. To address this issue, we used amplicon sequencing to quantify the microbiota (bacteria and fungi) in the soil of f...

Despite advances in sequencing, lack of standardization makes comparisons across studies challenging and hampers insights into the structure and function of microbial communities across multiple habitats on a planetary scale. Here we present a multi-omics analysis of a diverse set of 880 microbial community samples collected for the Earth Microbiom...

STUDY OF BANK VOLES INHABITING THE CHORNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE: A NEW APPROACH

Gut microbiota is expected to coevolve with the host's physiology and may play a role in adjusting the host's energy metabolism to suit the host's environment. To evaluate the effects of both evolved host metabolism and the environmental context in shaping the gut microbiota, we used a unique combination of (1) experimental evolution to create sele...

Evidence that exposure to environmental pollutants can alter the gut microbiota composition of wildlife includes studies of rodents exposed to radionuclides. Antwis et al. (2021) used amplicon sequencing to characterise the gut microbiota of four species of rodent (Myodes glareolus, Apodemus agrarius, A. flavicollis and A. sylvaticus) inhabiting th...

Shared genetic architecture between males and females may constrain independent evolutionary responses to sexually antagonistic selection (SAS), limiting the evolution of sexual dimorphism (SD) and imposing negative fitness consequences in each sex. Environmental change may also directly affect the expression of SD and underlying sex-specific genet...

Animal gut mycobiota, the community of fungi that reside within the gastrointestinal tract, make an important contribution to host health. Accordingly, there is an emerging interest to quantify the gut mycobiota of wild animals. However, many studies of wild animal gut mycobiota do not distinguish between the fungi that likely can reside within ani...

Mining and related industries are a major source of metal pollution. In contrast to the well-studied effects of exposure to metals on animal physiology and health, the impacts of environmental metal pollution on the gut microbiota of wild animals are virtually unknown. As the gut microbiota is a key component of host health, it is important to unde...

Altered copy number of certain highly repetitive regions of the genome, such as satellite DNA within heterochromatin and ribosomal RNA loci (rDNA), is hypothesized to help safeguard the genome against damage derived from external stressors. We quantified copy number of the 18S rDNA and a pericentromeric satellite DNA (Msat-160) in bank voles (Myode...

Species identity is thought to dominate over environment in shaping wild rodent gut microbiota, but it remains unknown whether the responses of host gut microbiota to shared anthropogenic habitat impacts are species‐specific or if the general gut microbiota response is similar across host species. Here, we compare the influence of exposure to radio...

Theory predicts that because costs constrain female sexual signaling, females are expected to have a low signaling effort that is increased with passing time until mating is secured. This pattern of signaling is expected to result from females balancing the costs associated with a higher than optimal signaling effort and those costs associated with...

Phenotypic plasticity can either hinder or promote adaptation to novel environments. Recent studies that have quantified alignments between plasticity, genetic variation and divergence propose that such alignments may reflect constraints that bias future evolutionary trajectories. Here, we emphasize that such alignments may themselves be a result o...

Gut microbiota play an important role in host health. Yet, the drivers and patterns of microbiota imbalance (dysbiosis) in wild animals remain largely unexplored. One hypothesised outcome of stress on animal microbiomes is a destabilised microbial community that is characterised by an increase in inter‐individual differences compared with microbiom...

Vertebrate gut microbiota provide many essential services to their host. To better understand the diversity of such services provided by gut microbiota in wild rodents, we assembled metagenome shotgun sequence data from a small mammal, the bank vole Myodes glareolus (Rodentia, Cricetidae). We were able to identify 254 metagenome assembled genomes (...

In organisms in which individuals mate multiply, knowledge of the proportion of offspring sired by the last male to mate (P2) under field conditions is important for a thorough understanding of how sexual selection works in nature. In many insect groups, pronounced intraspecific variation in P2 is commonplace. Interestingly, however, in stark contr...

Amplicon sequencing of partial regions of the ribosomal RNA loci (rDNA) is widely used to profile microbial communities. However, the rDNA is dynamic and can exhibit substantial interspecific and intraspecific variation in copy number in prokaryotes and, especially, in microbial eukaryotes. As change in rDNA copy number is a common response to envi...

Mitochondria are sensitive to oxidative stress, including that derived from ionizing radiation. To quantify the effects of exposure to environmental radionuclides on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) dynamics in wildlife, bank voles (Myodes glareolus) were collected from the chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ), where animals are exposed to elevated levels of ra...

Bank voles (Myodes glareolus) are host to many zoonotic viruses. As bank voles inhabiting areas contaminated by radionuclides show signs of immunosuppression, resistance to apoptosis, and elevated DNA repair activity, we predicted an association between virome composition and exposure to radionuclides. To test this hypothesis, we studied the bank v...

Wildlife inhabiting environments contaminated by radionuclides face putative detrimental effects of exposure to ionizing radiation, with biomarkers such as an increase in DNA damage and/or oxidative stress commonly associated with radiation exposure. To examine the effects of exposure to radiation on gene expression in wildlife, we conducted a de n...

Intergenerational fitness effects on offspring due to the early life of the parent are well studied from the standpoint of the maternal environment, but intergenerational effects owing to the paternal early life environment are often overlooked. Nonetheless, recent laboratory studies in mammals and ecologically relevant studies in invertebrates pre...

The early life environment can have profound, long‐lasting effects on an individual's fitness. For example, early life quality might (a) positively associate with fitness (a silver spoon effect), (b) stimulate a predictive adaptive response (by adjusting the phenotype to the quality of the environment to maximize fitness) or (c) be obscured by subs...

Nuclear accidents underpin the need to quantify the ecological mechanisms which determine injury to ecosystems from chronic low-dose radiation. Here, we tested the hypothesis that ecological mechanisms interact with ionizing radiation to affect natural populations in unexpected ways. We used large-scale replicated experiments and food manipulations...

Telomeres, the protective structures at the ends of chromosomes, can be shortened when individuals are exposed to stress. In some species, the enzyme telomerase is expressed in adult somatic tissues, and potentially protects or lengthens telomeres. Telomeres can be damaged by ionizing radiation and oxidative stress, although the effect of chronic e...

Background Animal skin and gut microbiomes are important components of host fitness. However, the processes that shape the microbiomes of wildlife are poorly understood, particularly with regard to exposure to environmental contaminants. We used 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to quantify how exposure to radionuclides impacts the skin and gut microbio...

Background: Elevated levels of environmental ionizing radiation can be a selective pressure for wildlife by producing reactive oxygen species and DNA damage. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms that are affected are not known. Results: We isolated skin fibroblasts from bank voles (Myodes glareolus) inhabiting the Chernobyl nuclear power...

Widespread use of neonicotinoid insecticides, such as imidacloprid, is often associated with diminishing populations of bees; this loss of pollinators presents a concern for food security and may cause unpredictable changes in ecological networks. However, little is known about the potential behavioural mechanisms behind the neonicotinoid-associate...

Supplementary material from “Low dose of neonicotinoid insecticide reduces foraging motivation of bumblebees”

Gut microbiota composition depends on many factors, although the impact of environmental pollution is largely unknown. We used amplicon sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes to quantify whether anthropogenic radionuclides at Chernobyl (Ukraine) impact the gut microbiome of the bank vole Myodes glareolus. Exposure to elevated levels of environmenta...

Exposure to ionizing radiation (IR) from radionuclides released into the environment can damage DNA. An expected response to exposure to environmental radionuclides, therefore, is initiation of DNA damage response (DDR) pathways. Increased DNA damage is a characteristic of many organisms exposed to radionuclides but expression of DDR genes of wildl...

The loci arginine vasopressin receptor 1a (avpr1a) and oxytocin receptor (oxtr) have evolutionarily conserved roles in vertebrate social and sexual behaviour. Allelic variation at a microsatellite locus in the 5' regulatory region of these genes is associated with fitness in the bank vole Myodes glareolus Given the low frequency of long and short a...

Determining whether comparable processes drive genetic divergence among marine species is relevant to molecular ecologists and managers alike. Sympatric species with similar life histories might be expected to show comparable patterns of genetic differentiation and a consistent influence of environmental factors in shaping divergence. We used micro...

Background: The flea Xenopsylla cheopis (Siphonaptera: Pulicidae) is a vector of plague. Despite this insect's medical importance, especially in Madagascar where plague is endemic, little is known about the organization of its natural populations. We undertook population genetic analyses (i) to determine the spatial genetic structure of X. cheopis...

Significance Arginine vasopressin receptor 1a ( Avpr1a ) and oxytocin receptor ( Oxtr ) are evolutionarily conserved loci that affect socio-reproductive behavior in many animals. That these loci affect fitness and exhibit substantial genetic variation in wild populations raises questions about the processes that maintain genetic variation at these...

Drosophila suzukii, commonly known as the spotted-wing Drosophila, is an invasive polyphagous fruit pest, which has emerged as a global threat to agriculture in the Americas and in Europe. Due to the rapid spread, great economic losses and its pest behavior, D. suzukii represents a powerful model for invasion biology and pest management studies. Ho...