Paper Reviewed
Bataillon, T., Galtier, N., Bernard, A., Cryer, N., Faivre, N., Santoni, S., Severac, D., Mikkelsen, T.N., Larsen, K.S., Beier, C., Sorensen, J.G., Holmstrup, M. and Ehlers, B.K. 2016. A replicated climate change field experiment reveals rapid evolutionary response in an ecologically important soil invertebrate. Global Change Biology 22: 2370-237.

Noting that few studies have documented genetic responses to climate change in manipulated experiments in the natural environment of an organism, Bataillon et al. (2016) decided to see if they could conduct such a study by looking for evolutionary responses to climate change in a common annelid worm in a controlled and replicated experiment conducted on a nutrient-poor heath/grassland ecosystem dominated by a grass and an evergreen dwarf shrub, where climatic conditions were manipulated in a natural setting. And what did they learn by so doing?

The 13 researchers -- hailing from Denmark, France and Norway -- report that by analyzing the transcribed genomes of 15 local populations of an ecologically important soil invertebrate (Chamaedrilus chlorophilus), they found that approximately 12% of its genetic polymorphisms exhibited significant differences in allele frequencies associated with imposed changes in soil temperature, soil moisture and atmospheric CO2 concentration.

As for the significance of their findings, Bataillon et al. conclude that these things show "an evolutionary response to realistic climate change happening over short-time scale," and they say that this finding thus calls for "incorporating evolution into models predicting future response of species to climate change," while further noting that "it also shows that designed climate change experiments coupled with genome sequencing offer great potential to test for the occurrence (or lack) of an evolutionary response."