A Trade-Off between Robustness to Environmental Fluctuations and Speed of Evolution

Understanding how a species’ life history affects its capacity to cope with environmental changes is important in the context of rapid climate changes. Reinterpreting previous results from a well-developed theoretical framework, we show that a trade-off exists between a species’ ability to genetically adapt to long-term gradual environmental changes and its ability to demographically resist short-term environmental perturbations, causing variation in its vital rates. Surprisingly, this important insight has not been made formally explicit before. Choosing archetypal life histories along the fast-slow pace-of-life continuum and modeling their eco-evolutionary dynamics, we further show that long-lived species have larger demographic robustness to interannual fluctuations but limited trait evolutionary responses in gradually changing environments. In contrast, short-lived species had larger evolvability but reduced demographic robustness. This trade-off bears heavily on extinction probabilities of populations tracking fast trait changes in stochastic environments. Faster trait evolution in short-lived species came at the expense of their higher sensitivity to short-term fluctuations, causing higher extinction rates than for long-lived species. Long-lived species persisted better on short timescales but built maladaptation and an extinction debt over time. This work shows how modeling species’ eco-evolutionary dynamics can help to assess species vulnerability to environmental changes.