Evolutionary rescue occurs when genetic change allows a population to persist in response to an environmental change that would otherwise have led to extinction. Most studies of evolutionary rescue assume that species have either fully clonal or fully sexual reproduction; however, many species have partially clonal reproductive strategies in which they reproduce both clonally and sexually. Furthermore, the few evolutionary rescue studies that have evaluated partially clonal reproduction did not consider fluctuations in the environment, which are nearly ubiquitous in nature. Here, we use individual-based simulations to investigate how environmental fluctuations (either uncorrelated or positively autocorrelated) influence the effect of clonality on evolutionary rescue. We show that, for moderate magnitudes of environmental fluctuations, as was found in the absence of fluctuations, increasing the degree of clonality increases the probability of population persistence in response to an abrupt environmental change, but decreases persistence in response to a continuous, directional environmental change. However, with large magnitudes of fluctuations, both the benefits of clonality following a step change and the detrimental effects of clonality following a continuous, directional change are generally reduced; in fact, in the latter scenario, increasing clonality can even become beneficial if environmental fluctuations are autocorrelated. We also show that increased generational overlap dampens the effects of environmental fluctuations. Overall, we demonstrate that understanding the evolutionary rescue of partially clonal organisms requires not only knowledge of the species life history and the type of environmental change, but also an understanding of the magnitude and autocorrelation of environmental fluctuations.

中文翻译：

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环境波动会抑制克隆繁殖对进化拯救的影响。

当遗传变化使种群能够继续应对可能导致灭绝的环境变化时，就会发生进化拯救。大多数关于进化拯救的研究都假设物种具有完全克隆或完全有性繁殖的能力。但是，许多物种具有部分克隆的繁殖策略，在其中克隆繁殖和有性繁殖。此外，少数评估了部分克隆繁殖的进化挽救研究并未考虑环境的波动，这在自然界几乎是普遍存在的。在这里，我们使用基于个体的模拟来研究环境波动（不相关或正自相关）如何影响克隆对进化救援的影响。我们表明，对于中等程度的环境波动，正如在没有波动的情况下所发现的那样，提高克隆度会增加人口对突然的环境变化作出反应的持久性的可能性，但会降低对连续的，有方向性的环境变化做出反应的持久性的可能性。但是，随着波动幅度的增大，通常会降低阶跃变化后的克隆性带来的好处以及连续不断的方向性变化后的克隆性带来的不利影响；实际上，在后一种情况下，如果环境波动是自相关的，则增加克隆性甚至会变得有益。我们还表明，世代交叠的增加抑制了环境波动的影响。全面的，