SerpApi.Org
Research co-authored by an Oklahoma Museum of Natural History curator, her graduate student and an international team of scientists has shed new light on the evolutionary "toolkit" animals use to survive environmental change.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest sci-tech news updates.
The study, published in Communications Biology, was led by Marcos da Cruz, a University of Oklahoma Ph.D. student in the laboratory of Dr. Hayley Lanier, associate curator of mammals at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, who also co-authored the research.
Along with an international team of collaborators from the Czech Academy of Sciences, the researchers discovered that much of the genetic variation these animals use to adapt to new environments was inherited from their distant ancestors rather than newly evolved adaptations developed in response to changing conditions.
The findings suggest that maintaining large, genetically diverse wildlife populations today is critical for helping species respond to future challenges.
"Our study helps to show that the genes underlying climate adaptation are almost entirely dependent on retained ancestral variation, not newly evolved adaptations," Lanier said. "The size of an animal's ancestral population helps shape the amount of genetic diversity it carries today, and that diversity provides the raw material natural selection can work with as environments change."
Why bank voles stood out
The research team focused on a hardy and widespread rodent native to Europe: the bank vole. Because bank voles thrive across a broad geographic range, from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, and occupy a wide variety of habitats, they provide an exceptional opportunity to understand how mammals respond to environmental change.
By sequencing the entire genome of individual animals and comparing populations from different climates, researchers were able to identify genetic variations associated with climate adaptation and trace their origins.
The research took approximately five years to complete and involved the collection and analysis of large quantities of genomic data to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the species.
"It supports the idea that the past history of a population is critical for shaping future responses to climate change," Lanier said. "The more we can do to help populations retain their genetic variation—by protecting habitats and preventing population declines—the better prepared they'll be to adapt to future environmental challenges."
A shrinking gene pool limits options
Lanier says these genetically diverse populations effectively possess something like an evolutionary toolkit, allowing future generations to adapt to changing circumstances through the diversity preserved within their gene pool. A larger gene pool from larger populations means a larger toolkit that a species can use to survive.
"Populations that come from large, genetically diverse ancestral populations have a much broader set of genetic variations that natural selection can draw upon," she said. "If that diversity is lost through population declines or habitat fragmentation, species may have fewer options available as they face future environmental changes."
According to Lanier, the bank vole still has more to teach us. Ongoing and future studies aim to better understand how populations balance genetic diversity with newly evolved changes, offering insights that could inform conservation strategies for wildlife populations facing rapid environmental change.
More information: Marcos O. R. da Cruz et al, Origins of adaptive genomic variation in a wild rodent, Communications Biology (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-026-10511-6
Provided by University of Oklahoma - Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
This story was originally published on Phys.org.
