Evolutionary responses of invertebrates to global climate change: The role of life-history trade-offs and multidecadal climate shifts

Life-history trade-offs will likely constrain the simultaneous optimisation of correlated suites of traits as invertebrates respond to global climate change. Therefore, a synthetic description of the fundamental trade-offs driving invertebrate evolutionary responses to global warming is needed. Here, five complementary trade-offs are described, including pleiotropic effects of endocrine hormonal signalling pathways, resource allocation, enzyme multi-functionality, thermal stability-kinetic efficiency, and various forms of water loss trade-offs. We also identify a gap in the study of the evolutionary responses of invertebrates to global warming: the examination of multidecadal climate dynamics and the emergence of non-analogous climates. The available evidence supports that different functional haplotypes effectively track decadal climate variability, creating newgenetic landscapes that may contingently determine the adaptive capacity of species. The development of methods to extract DNA from ancient and historical samples now allows the study of historical biogeographical patterns of genetic polymorphisms (SNPs). When coupled with multidecadal information on climatic variability, it allows the study ofmultidecadal evolutionary responses of invertebrates to global warming and to abrupt shifts in drought regimes. This research is, in turn, facilitated by emerging modelling approaches that can effectively integrate genotype-phenotype-environment associations. Ultimately, this permits landscape studies of turnover in polymorphic candidate genes and the characterisation of non-linear threshold responses to drought and climatic variables.