Consumer co-evolution as an important component of the eco-evolutionary feedback

Rapid evolution in ecologically relevant traits has recently been recognized to significantly alter the interaction between consumers and their resources, a key interaction in all ecological communities. While these eco-evolutionary dynamics have been shown to occur when prey populations are evolving, little is known about the role of predator evolution and co-evolution between predator and prey in this context. Here, we investigate the role of consumer co-evolution for eco-evolutionary feedback in bacteria–ciliate microcosm experiments by manipulating the initial trait variation in the predator populations. With co-evolved predators, prey evolve anti-predatory defences faster, trait values are more variable, and predator and prey population sizes are larger at the end of the experiment compared with the non-co-evolved predators. Most importantly, differences in predator traits results in a shift from evolution driving ecology, to ecology driving evolution. Thus we demonstrate that predator co-evolution has important effects on eco-evolutionary dynamics.