Continuously fluctuating selection reveals extreme granularity and parallelism of adaptive tracking

Abstract

Temporally fluctuating environmental conditions are a ubiquitous feature of natural habitats. Yet, how finely natural populations adaptively track fluctuating selection pressures via shifts in standing genetic variation is unknown. We generated high-frequency, genome-wide allele frequency data from a genetically diverse population of Drosophila melanogaster in extensively replicated field mesocosms from late June to mid-December, a period of [~]12 generations. Adaptation throughout the fundamental ecological phases of population expansion, peak density, and collapse was underpinned by extremely rapid, parallel changes in genomic variation across replicates. Yet, the dominant direction of selection fluctuated repeatedly, even within each of these ecological phases. Comparing patterns of allele frequency change to an independent dataset procured from the same experimental system demonstrated that the targets of selection are predictable across years. In concert, our results reveal fitness-relevance of standing variation that is likely to be masked by inference approaches based on static population sampling, or insufficiently resolved time-series data. We propose such fine-scaled temporally fluctuating selection may be an important force maintaining functional genetic variation in natural populations and an important stochastic force affecting levels of standing genetic variation genome-wide.