Species that exhibit broad ranges of distribution may successfully navigate environmental changes by modifying some of their life history traits. Environmental humidity imposes a critical stress that organisms may overcome by increasing their resistance to desiccation. We used experimental evolution to investigate adaptation to desiccation in the tephritid Anastrepha ludens, a species with high fecundity, late maturation and long lifespan. We measured morphological, physiological, developmental as well as demographic changes involved in the adaptation to desiccation. Notwithstanding a low heritability (h2 = 0.237), desiccation resistance evolved extremely rapidly and few negative trade-offs were detected. Selected flies exhibited correlated increases in longevity, body size, the amount of body lipids and bulk water content, and in the duration of the pupal stage. Females further delayed sexual maturation, decreased daily fecundity but retained high lifetime reproductive potential. No differences in male mating competitiveness were found. Selected and control lines differed in longevity but not in total female fecundity, demonstrating that A. ludens flies have the capability for fast adaptation to desiccation without loosing their reproductive capability. Thus, it seems that a rapid evolutionary response to desiccation in this polyphagous insect works as a buffer for environmental variation and reduces the strength of selection on reproductive traits.
Response to selection
Sheet 1: Raw data of survival and their phenotypic variance (standard deviation) for each population, sex, generation combination. Sheet 2: model fitted to test for response to selection, note that we nest generation in treatment. Sheet 3: mean survival for each population and generation combination, Grand means for each treatment for each generation, as presented in Fig 1 and supplementary table 1. "Parental" represent the survivial data of moscafut mass reared strain tested at F7 (not included on the model).
Heritability
Sheet 1: Raw data of resistance, selection intensities and response to selection by sex. Sheet 2: Final data based on a population level (mean intensity on population) and the estimated response for each selection event. Final variables are "selection cumulative" and "response cumulative". Note that response are corrected by mean control resistance on each generation. Sheet 3: Using the data on sheet 2 , we present the full model to asses the heritabilitty. Note that model are fixed to the origin (no selection have no response).
Demography - life tables
Sheet 1: Raw data of demography (dialy survival and fecundity) for each population (C1-C5, D1-D5). Sheet 2-11: demography and estimated demography parameters for each population. Sheet 12 Mean of estimated parameters by treatment. Sheet 13-14: pool demography by treatment. Sheet 15 : Cumulative survival and reproduction by treatment as presented on figure 3.
transition matrices
Sheet 1: transition matrices for each population. symbols: p= survival (transition) ; f= fecundity ; C= control population; D= desiccation or selected population; 1-5= number of replica population. Note: see Rockwood 2006 to see details of construction of Px and Fx from a life table. Life tables of each population are presented on a separated file. For LTRE analysis, mean transition matrices per treatment was used. See "popbio" library of R for details of LTRE analysis and lambda estimation.
Size water and lipids
For the analysis of Size, water and lipids contain on selected and control treatments the raw data and the data for each population are presented. Sheet 1: Raw data for each fly, on desing we proyected 15 fly per sex of each population. Sheet 2: Data of each population by sex, was constructed using mean of individual values. Full factorial was used to analyzed the response to selection.
Pupal stage duration
We present the duration of pupal stage, in hrs, of individuals flies for each population and replica. Sheet 1: Raw data of time to emerge of each fly. Sheet 2: parametric survival model of time to emerge and the estimated time were 50% of the flies had emerged from the pupa. Note that some factors are nested and data are presented per replica. Sheet 3: estimated mean time to emerge by replica, then, mean of replicas by population and, then, mean of populations to obtain treatment means.
Sexual Competitiveness
Sheet1: we present the frequency of copulas per treatment for each of the 18 field cages. Sheet 2: Analysis : chi squared test for competitiveness between selected and control males.
Sexual competitiveness.xlsx