American alligator salt stress experiment

Understanding the role of phenotypic plasticity in adaptive evolution is one of the central goals in evolutionary theory. The behavioral plasticity-led evolution (BPLE) hypothesis postulates that behavioral plasticity catalyzes the process of adaptive evolution. While some studies have discussed the theoretical implications of BPLE, very few studies have tested this hypothesis. Using a common-garden experiment, we tested the BPLE hypothesis in natural populations of alligators by exposing coastal (derived) and inland (ancestral-proxy) alligators to a gradient of three salinities (hypo-, iso- and hyper-osmotic) for two weeks and measuring functional traits at different levels of organization (behavior, physiology, and gene expression).