At the 16th AAABG conference in 2005, a proposal was launched to organise a symposium to examine advances in understanding of “adaptive fitness, both in managed populations being conserved and domestic animal species being utilised for food and agriculture production”. After discussion about the term “adaptive fitness” some of us decided we should organise a symposium “Adaptation and Fitness in Animal Populations – Evolutionary and breeding perspectives on genetic resource management” to be held at the 2007 AAABG meeting in Armidale.
The term ‘adaptive fitness’ in itself is somewhat a tautology, but fitness and adaptation are both relevant concepts when one is concerned with the long term sustainability of animal breeding programs and animal production systems in a broader sense. Fitness of farm animal populations is clearly becoming a concern, especially in programs that have achieved substantial genetic change for ‘production traits’ or where environmental stressors are intense. Adaptation is required to maintain fitness in new or changing environments. Adaptive mechanisms are very important in animal production systems where genotypes are used globally without being explicitly tested in all the environments where they are kept. Adaptability is also important within animal production systems experiencing large between-year variability in the environment. Understanding such mechanisms and their relationships with the production traits may help to more successfully realise sustainable
productivity gains.
Evolutionary geneticists are continuously exploring the genetic mechanisms that surround fitness and adaptation in natural populations. Consequently it seemed appropriate to have a debate among animal geneticists and evolutionary biologists. The chapters from this book are a reflection of the symposium papers that were presented in September 2007 in Armidale. The book is divided into four sections, corresponding to the different sessions that we identified for the symposium. Each of these sessions addressed specific questions that we had posed before the symposium. We asked the chair of each session to summarise the discussion and this discussion summary completes the set of papers for each section of the book. Prof. Stuart Barker’s primary life’s work has been directed at understanding fitness and the evolution of natural populations. He begins the book by reviewing developments over time in the definition of fitness and its components. This assisted us in arriving at a uniform set of terms for use in addressing these components.