title: An indigenous religious ritual selects for resistance to a toxicant in a livebearing fish.
abstract: Human-induced environmental change can affect the evolutionary trajectory of populations. In Mexico, indigenous Zoque people annually introduce barbasco, a fish toxicant, into the Cueva del Azufre to harvest fish during a religious ceremony. Here, we investigated tolerance to barbasco in fish from sites exposed and unexposed to the ritual. We found that barbasco tolerance increases with body size and differs between the sexes. Furthermore, fish from sites exposed to the ceremony had a significantly higher tolerance. Consequently, the annual ceremony may not only affect population structure and gene flow among habitat types, but the increased tolerance in exposed fish may indicate adaptation to human cultural practices in a natural population on a very small spatial scale.
authors.affiliation: Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA. michi.tobler@gmail.com
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tobler
authors.forename: Z W
authors.initials: ZW
authors.lastname: Culumber
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Plath
authors.forename: K O
authors.initials: KO
authors.lastname: Winemiller
authors.forename: G G
authors.initials: GG
authors.lastname: Rosenthal
mesh_terms: D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D000818:Animals; D049628:Body Size; D002562:Ceremonial Behavior; D004361:Drug Tolerance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D032126:Paullinia / Q000633:toxicity*; D011036:Poecilia / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D012067:Religion; D012737:Sex Factors; D018675:Toxicity Tests
references.citation: Ecology. 2010 May;91(5):1494-505
references.pmid: 20503881
references.citation: Biol Lett. 2010 Feb 23;6(1):98-101
references.pmid: 19740890
references.citation: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2001 May 8;98(10):5458-65
references.pmid: 11344294
references.citation: Evolution. 2008 Oct;62(10):2643-59
references.pmid: 18637957
references.citation: J Exp Zool. 1999 Dec 15;285(4):326-59
references.pmid: 10578109
references.citation: Biol Lett. 2009 Aug 23;5(4):506-9
references.pmid: 19443506
references.citation: Extremophiles. 2006 Dec;10(6):577-85
references.pmid: 16788733
references.citation: Biochim Biophys Acta. 1994 Aug 30;1187(2):198-202
references.pmid: 8075112
references.citation: BMC Evol Biol. 2010 Aug 23;10:256
references.pmid: 20731863
references.citation: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Apr 3;104(14):5732-7
references.pmid: 17360379
references.citation: Mol Ecol. 2007 Mar;16(5):967-76
references.pmid: 17305854