Some bacteria become less cooperative with their plant hosts under long-term nutrient additions, finds new research by Jen Lau, an ecologist at the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) LTER, and her collaborator Katy Heath at the University of Illinois.
“A decade ago, no one was thinking about the idea of rapid evolution—the kind you could see over a career or even a year or two,” says Lau. Now researchers know that evolution can be measured at much smaller timescales than previously thought. Lau sees the long-term nutrient-addition experiments run at most LTERs as untapped opportunities to study evolutionary change in bacteria and plants.
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