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Abstract

Increasing attention is being devoted to the study of phenotypic plasticity in social environments. However, much remains unknown about the selection pressures driving the evolution of social plasticity, as well as the pathways by which social plasticity may facilitate or constrain feedback between ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Here, we explore these questions using quantitative genetic models, providing general results regarding the causes of selection on social reaction norms, as well as their consequences for adaptive microevolution in fluctuating environments. We model the fitness effects of character states expressed across spatially heterogeneous microhabitats, with variation in the degree to which trait expression and selection are affected by the local social environment. We find that when selection on character states is frequency-dependent within microhabitats, stochastic fluctuations in the social environment cause selection for reversible social plasticity across microhabitats, as quantified by the interaction coefficient Ψ. When the phenotype is heritable, fluctuating frequency-dependent selection further promotes the adaptive evolution of indirect genetic effects (IGEs). Ecological factors can shape the frequency-dependent costs and benefits of social interactions, such as through density dependence. Fluctuations in the ecological state of the social environment cause selection for multidimensional social plasticity and context-dependent IGEs, as well as quadratic selection on the phenotypic (co)variance generated by social plasticity within and across microhabitats. We demonstrate how pathways of socio-eco-evolutionary feedback can arise across microevolutionary timescales during the adaptation of socially plastic traits. Our findings provide testable predictions for future comparative research and suggest that mechanisms of social plasticity likely play a key functional role in linking ecological and evolutionary dynamics across contemporary timescales. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2025

Notes/Citation Information

Publisher Copyright: © 2025 The Author(s). Functional Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1111/1365-2435.70132

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