#Wildflowers evolved fast enough to survive a historic #drought

By Andrei Ionescu
March 13, 2026

Excerpt: "A potted #ScarletMonkeyFlower can look fine one day and collapse a few days later if you forget to water it. But out in the wild, some populations of this same species made it through #California’s brutal four-year drought.

"The wildflowers didn’t survive because the drought 'wasn’t that bad,' or because the plants found hidden water. They survived because, according to a new study, they evolved fast enough to keep up.

"The researchers tracked scarlet monkeyflower populations in #Oregon and California for more than a decade.

"The team reports something scientists have long discussed but rarely captured in nature from start to finish: climate-driven decline, rapid genetic adaptation across the whole genome, and then recovery in some populations.

"In other words, '#EvolutionaryRescue' happening in the real world, not just in theory or in lab experiments."

Read more:
https://www.earth.com/news/wildflowers-evolved-fast-enough-to-survive-a-historic-drought/

#Superblooms #Evolution #ClimateChangeAdaptation #Flowers #ClimateChange #ExtremeDrought #Wildflowers

Evolution is faster with stronger selection, but this may come with a demographic cost. Xu & Osmond characterized conditions when the chance of evolutionary rescue increases with the strength of selection across different scenarios.

Read now ahead of print!
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/739607

#EvolutionaryRescue #QuantitativeGenetics #EEB

🚨 new #preprint online 🚨

Rapid evolution in response to changing environmental conditions is often considered beneficial, as it can help species to persist in changing environments. However, evolution can also be detrimental. 1st author Simon Leoz examines eco-evolutionary dynamics of competitive systems and finds a case of evolutionary murder, where rapid evolution of one species drives another one towards extinction.

#TheoreticalEcology
#EvolutionaryRescue
#EcoEvo

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.14.699340v1.full

Hello dear fellow modellers, it's time to plan the next conference season! Anyone planning to attend the #MPDEE in Leicester next year? If yes, shall we propose a minisymposium together?

I was thinking about something in the direction of #EcologicalNetworks and/or #EcoEvoFeedback and/or #EvolutionaryRescue but that's still a very uncooked idea...

More info here:
https://dbearup.github.io/mpdee26/

#YoMos @YoMosEco #TheoreticalEcology

Reid et al. use empirically-based theoretical modeling to show how immigration rate affects the competing outcomes of evolutionary rescue, inbreeding-induced extinction vortex and migrational meltdown.

Read now ahead of print!
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/737752

#TheoreticalModeling #EvolutionaryRescue #EEB

The symposium on mechanisms of adaptation to changing conditions in microorganisms (S34) is taking place today and I’m presenting a poster. If you’d like to learn about the role hypermutation and environmental fluctuations play in rescuing a cold-adapted marine bacterium from heat death, feel free ro stop by P03.122 anytime between 17:00 and 19:00

#ESEB2025 #evolution #microbiology #bacteria #EvolutionaryRescue

@HildegardUecker and I are excited to be running the second edition of our #EvolutionaryRescue workshop series at the #MaxPlanck Plön, June 30-July 3. This time the focus is on bridging theory and experiments.

Invited speakers: Helen Alexander, Lutz Becks, Robert D Holt, Laure Olazcuaga, Jitka Polechova.

Submit an abstract by March 15 and tell your friends.

More info: https://workshops.evolbio.mpg.de/event/128/

#Evolution #ecoevo #evol_gen #MathematicalModeling #MathematicalBiology

Happy International Day of #EvolutionaryRescue!

(29 years ago today @gomulki and Bob Holt had their rescue-defining paper accepted.)

Thanks to @HildegardUecker for organizing the third consecutive year of celebrations.

Today we heard a great talk by @Olazcuaga on the role of demographic history and density-dependence in experiments with flour beetles.

Can't wait till next year!