With just under 2 years left of a 5 year project, META-STRESS, which is co-ordinated at the University of Helsinki, has been studying the large metapopulation of the Glanville fritillary Butterfly in order to test how organisms cope with environmental stress and the eco-evolutionary consequences.
The potential results of the project could prove ground-breaking in the world evolutionary biology as it strives to understand how (1) “individual responses to unfavourable environmental conditions and the underlying mechanisms vary within and among local populations in a spatially and temporally heterogeneous environment” and (2) “how the consequent life history variation influences the ecological and microevolutionary dynamics of wold populations”.