Conclusions
Our resurrection ecology study of evolution in a natural population
provides unique input at the metabolomic level to the ongoing debate on
the relationships between ancestral plasticity and subsequent
evolutionary changes (Levis & Pfennig 2016). We addressed two important
outstanding questions (Ghalambor et al. 2007, 2015; López-Mauryet al. 2008; Levis & Pfennig 2016; Fox et al. 2019).
First, we showed ancestral plasticity and evolution to contribute nearly
equally in driving total metabolomic changes through time. Second, we
demonstrated that evolution of plasticity magnified the ancestral
plasticity when a new selection pressure was imposed. Such insights are
important to advance our ability to understand and predict how
populations might deal with the new and strong selection pressures they
are increasingly dealing with.