Can recent social evolutionary history promote resilience to environmental change?

Principles of social evolution have long been used retrospectively to interpret social interactions, but have less commonly been applied predictively to inform conservation and animal husbandry strategies. We investigate whether differences in developmental environment, facilitated by divergent social conditions, can predict resilience to environmental change. Upon exposure to harsh novel environments, populations that previously experienced more benign social environments are predicted either to suffer fitness losses (the “mutation load hypothesis” and “selection filter hypothesis”) or maintain fitness (the “beneficial mutation hypothesis”). We tested these contrasting predictions using populations of burying beetles Nicrophorus vespilloides we had evolved experimentally for 45 generations under contrasting social environments by manipulating the supply of post-hatching parental care. We exposed sexually immature adults from each population to varying heat stress and measured the effec..., , , ## Can recent evolutionary history promote resilience to environmental change? Comments and requests should be addressed to Eleanor Bladon: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) or [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) ### Description of the data and file structure Details of data collection methods for each of the datasets can be found in the manuscript listed above. ##### \"Bladon et al 2024 - Thermal survival data\" and \"Bladon et al 2024 - Thermal breeding data\" contain the following columns: *ID - The unique identifier given to each breeding pair of beetles *Block - Experimental block 1 or 2 *Treatment - FCinFC = the adults (the focal individuals in the survival dataset and the parents in the breeding dataset) were from an experimental evolution Full Care population and received full parental care themselves; FCinNC = the parents were from an experimental evolution Full Care population but received no post-hatching parental care themselves; NCinNC = ...