The quantitative genetics of physiological and morphological traits in an invasive terrestrial snail: additive versus non-additive genetic variation

1. The distribution of additive versus non-additive genetic variation in natural populations represents a central topic of research in evolutionary/organismal biology. For evolutionary physiologists, functional or whole-animal performance traits (“physiological traits”) are frequently studied assuming they are heritable and variable in populations. 2. Physiological traits of evolutionary relevance are those functional capacities measured at the whole-organism level, with a potential impact on fitness. They can be classified as capacities (or performances) or costs, the former being directly correlated with fitness, and the latter being inversely correlated with fitness (usually assumed as constraints). 3. In spite of their obvious adaptive significance, the additive genetic variation of physiological traits, and its relative contribution to phenotypic variance (or narrow-sense heritability) in comparison to maternal, dominance or epistatic variance, is known only for a few groups such a...