The role of eco-evolutionary experience in invasion success

Abstract

Invasion ecology has made considerable progress in identifying specific mechanisms that potentially de- termine success and failure of biological invasions. Increasingly, efforts are being made to interrelate or even synthesize the growing number of hypotheses in order to gain a more comprehensive and integrative understanding of invasions. We argue that adopting an eco-evolutionary perspective on invasions is a promising approach to achieve such integration. It emphasizes the evolutionary antecedents of invasions, i.e. the species’ evolutionary legacy and its role in shaping novel biotic interactions that arise due to inva- sions. We present a conceptual framework consisting of five hypothetical scenarios about the influence of so-called ‘eco-evolutionary experience’ in resident native and invading non-native species on invasion success, depending on the type of ecological interaction (predation, competition, mutualism, and com- mensalism). We show that several major ecological invasion hypotheses, including ‘enemy release’, ‘EICA’, ‘novel weapons’, ‘naïve prey’, ‘new associations’, ‘missed mutualisms’ and ‘Darwin’s naturalization hypoth- esis’ can be integrated into this framework by uncovering their shared implicit reference to the concept of eco-evolutionary experience. We draft a routine for the assessment of eco-evolutionary experience in native and non-native species using a food web-based example and propose two indices (xpFocal xpResidents index and index) for the actual quantification of eco-evolutionary experience. Our study emphasizes the explanatory potential of an eco-evolutionary perspective on biological invasions.