Panmixia across elevation in thermally sensitive Andean dung beetles

Abstract

Janzen’s seasonality hypothesis predicts that organisms inhabiting environments with limited climatic variability will evolve a reduced thermal tolerance breadth compared with organisms experiencing greater climatic variability. In turn, narrow tolerance breadth may select against dispersal across strong temperature gradients, such as those found across elevation. This can result in narrow elevational ranges and generate a pattern of isolation-by-environment, or neutral genetic differentiation correlated with environmental variables that is independent of geographic distance. We tested for signatures of isolation-by-environment across elevation using genome-wide SNP data from five species of Andean dung beetles (subfamily Scarabaeinae) with well-characterized, narrow thermal physiologies and narrow elevational distributions. Contrary to our expectations, we found no evidence of population genetic structure associated with elevation and little signal of isolationby- environment. Further, elevational ranges for four of five species appear to be at equilibrium and show no evidence of demographic constraints at range limits. Taken together, these results suggest physiological constraints on dispersal may primarily operate outside of a stable realized niche.