Phenotypic plasticity and the effects of thermal fluctuations on specialists and generalists

Classical theories predict that relatively constant environments should generally favour specialists, while fluctuating environments should be selected for generalists. However, theoretical and empirical results have pointed out that generalist organisms might, on the contrary, perform poorly under fluctuations. In particular, if generalism is underlaid by phenotypic plasticity, performance of generalists should be modulated by the temporal characteristics of environmental fluctuations. Here, we used experiments in microcosms of Tetrahymena thermophila ciliates and a mathematical model to test whether the period or autocorrelation of thermal fluctuations mediate links between the level of generalism and the performance of organisms under fluctuations. In the experiment, thermal fluctuations consistently impeded performance compared with constant conditions. However, the intensity of this effect depended on the level of generalism: while the more specialist strains performed better under fast or negatively autocorrelated fluctuations, plastic generalists performed better under slow or positively autocorrelated fluctuations. Our model suggests that these effects of fluctuations on organisms' performance may result from a time delay in the expression of plasticity, restricting its benefits to slow enough fluctuations. This study points out the need to further investigate the temporal dynamics of phenotypic plasticity to better predict its fitness consequences under environmental fluctuations.