Contaminant driven genetic erosion and associated hypotheses on alleles loss, reduced population growth rate and increased susceptibility to future stressors: an essay

Open Access

Abstract

Microevolution due to pollution can occur mainly through genetic drift bottlenecks, especially of small sized populations facing intense lethal pulses of contaminants, through mutations, increasing allelic diversity, and through natural selection, with the disappearance of the most sensitive genotypes. This loss of genotypes can lead to serious effects if coupled to specific hypothetical scenarios. These may be categorized as leading, first, to the loss of alleles—the recessive tolerance inheritance hypothesis. Second, leading to a reduction of the population growth rate—the mutational load and fitness costs hypotheses. Third, leading to an increased susceptibility of further genetic erosion both at future inputs of the same contaminant—differential physiological recovery, endpoints (dis)association, and differential phenotypic plasticity hypotheses—and at sequential or simultaneous inputs of other contaminants—the multiple stressors differential tolerance hypothesis. Species in narrowly fluctuating environments (tropics and deep sea) may have a particularly high susceptibility to genetic erosion—the Plus c¸a change (plus c'est la meme chose) hypothesis. A discussion on the consequences of these hypotheses is what this essay aimed at. ; This study was partially funded by FSE and POPH (Ciência 2007), by national funds (OE) through Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior (MCTES) (http://alfa.fct. mctes.pt) and co-funded by the European Union (project ref. PTDC/ AAC-AMB/104532/2008).