Question

I'm thinking here about environmental disturbance or likeclimate change-driven warming. It seems as if there are twomacroevolutionary ways to deal with environmental change:

1) Have short generation times, and evolve fast. For instance,the mosquito Wyeomyia smithii is under selection by the warmingclimate in North America and it has shown an evolutionary repsonse.The response is "detectable over a time interval as short as 5years" (Bradshaw and Holzapfel 2001).

2) Be hardy, and 'try' to wait out changes. No real-worldexample to cite, but imagine a long-lived tree growing in an areathat has become to warm for its seeds to effectively produceseedlings.

It seems intuitively like strategy 1 is better in the case ofongoing climate warming. However, we could easily imagine a 5-yearhot spell followed by a return to the normal as part of naturalweather variation. Perhaps in this situation strategy 2 isbetter.

Essentially, having a longevity/generation time/hardiness thatmatches the time-scale of the disturbance would be important