Agriculture, industry and climate change modify the environment and redistribute species, both of which require natural populations to adapt into these new conditions. Adaptation can be accelerated by hybridization with a related species, because hybridization can transfer adaptive genes. However, it is still unclear under which conditions hybridization leads to positive consequences for natural populations instead of negative ones. Here I will use wood ants and large-scale genomic data over 15 years to infer the outcomes of hybridization in time and space. In addition, I will use experiments to understand how natural selection acts on hybrid individuals. Together these aims will help to elucidate the extent to which hybridization leads to positive and negative fitness consequences and reveals whether these can fluctuate over time, something that has been achieved in very few systems.

2019

2024