Evolutionary rescue

The earliest recorded observation of the concept of evolutionary rescue was made by English philosophers Haldane[4] in 1937 and Simpson[5] who tossed around the idea of how populations might evolve in response to changes in their environment.

Orr & Unckless (2014) then furthered Gomulkiewicz & Holt's work by describing these processes together to create the U-shaped abundance trajectory.

Natural populations threatened by extinction are under stress by invasive pests or pathogens that have increased resistance to pesticides and antibiotics.

Together, the linkage allows the recombination of two beneficial alleles to enhance the fitness of that population, thus giving rise to adaptations that succeed in evolutionary rescue.

[19] Populations in relocated habitats with abundant genotypes to adapt to their environment have increased chances of surviving by undergoing evolutionary rescue.

[20] Destruction of natural habitats by human influence limits the ability of a population to increase and disperse, thus interrupting evolutionary rescue from succeeding.

[21] Evolutionary rescue has been demonstrated in many different experimental evolution studies,[1] such as yeast evolving to tolerate previously lethal salt concentrations.

a theoretical depiction of evolutionary rescue.
Evolutionary rescue is expected to produce a U-shaped curve of population dynamics after a sudden change in the environment, as genotypes that are unable replace themselves are replaced by those that can. Figure from [ 12 ]