Reply to ‘Inconclusive evidence for rapid adaptive evolution’

In our study, we showed that a newly founded population of reed warblers in Malta had undergone a decrease in body mass through 19 years, following a trajectory consistent with a population ascending an adaptive peak, an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process (OU). Neto et al. claim that our result is an artifact of including migrants in the dataset, which inflated the average body mass in the initial years. Controlling for possible seasonal effects is important, which we thank Neto et al. for pointing out. We now control for season in three different ways and the OU-model always fits better than the neutral model, further strengthening our original conclusion of adaptive evolution.