From wrecks of ancient life to natural laboratories: cave organisms as a testing ground for studying repeatability and predictability in evolution.
Predicting evolution is one of the major aims of evolutionary biologists. Convergent evolution—the independent outcome of similar traits in distinct lineages—occurs frequently in nature at every level of biological organization in distinct evolutionary lineages. In this context, convergence has been considered to play contrasting roles in shaping biodiversity patterns. The success of colonizing and thriving in a new environment strongly depends on the existence, or lack, of specialized traits that ensure survival in it, a phenomenon referred to as environmental filtering. Thus, organisms adapted to extreme environmental conditions provide an ideal framework to study repeatability in evolution and, ultimately, to test for predictability, the ability to match a priori specialized traits to specific environmental conditions. Subterranean extreme environmental conditions exert strong selective pressure on strict cave-dwelling organisms which, respond by evolving a similar suit of phenotypic and physiological traits. The main aim of this project is to investigate whether environmental selective pressures, determine patterns of genomic convergent evolution in obligate cave-dwelling organisms. I will use an interdisciplinary approach, integrating field research, available ecological and phenotypic data, and newly generated genomic information to investigate the genomic bases of convergent evolution in cave-dwelling organisms. For this, I propose to investigate i) the genomic basis of adaptation to different subterranean microhabitats, ii) the speciation mechanisms in subterranean species, and iii) the causes of phylogenetic constrain on microhabitat preference. This project will give an unprecedented understanding of repeated evolution. Additionally, the results obtained may have far-reaching implications for medicine and conservation biology, of great relevance to several H2020 Focus Areas.