Local adaptations can determine the potential of populations to respond to environmental changes, yet adaptive genetic variation is commonly ignored in models forecasting species vulnerability and biogeographical shifts under future climate change. Here we integrate genomic and ecological modeling approaches to identify genetic adaptations associated with climate in two cryptic forest bats. We then incorporate this information directly into forecasts of range changes under future climate change and assessment of population persistence through the spread of climate-adaptive genetic variation (evolutionary rescue potential). Considering climate-adaptive potential reduced range loss projections, suggesting that failure to account for intraspecific variability can result in overestimation of future losses. On the other hand, range overlap between species was projected to increase, indicating that interspecific competition is likely to play an important role in limiting species’ future ranges. We show that although evolutionary rescue is possible, it depends on a population’s adaptive capacity and connectivity. Hence, we stress the importance of incorporating genomic data and landscape connectivity in climate change vulnerability assessments and conservation management.

The identification of the ret oncogene by Masahide Takahashi and Geoffrey Cooper in 1985 was both serendipitous and paradigmatic ( Takahashi et al. 1985). By transfecting total DNA from a human lymphoma into mouse NIH3T3 cells, they obtained one clone, which in secondary transformants yielded more than 100-fold improvement in transformation efficiency. Subsequent investigations revealed that the ret oncogene was not present as such in the primary lymphoma, but was derived by DNA rearrangement during transfection from normal human sequences of the ret locus. At the time, activation by DNA rearrangement had not been previously described for a transforming gene with the NIH3T3 transfection assay. The discovery of ret opened a field of study that has had a profound impact in cancer research, developmental biology, and neuroscience, and that continues to yield surprises and important insights to this day.

We investigate the contribution of the Iberian bat fauna to the cryptic diversity in Europe using mitochondrial (cytb and ND1) and nuclear (RAG2) DNA sequences. For each of the 28 bat species known for Iberia, samples covering a wide geographic range within Spain were compared to samples from the rest of Europe. In this general screening, almost 20% of the Iberian species showed important mitochondrial discontinuities (K2P distance values > 5%) either within the Iberian or between Iberian and other European samples. Within Eptesicus serotinus and Myotis nattereri, levels of genetic divergence between lineages exceeded 16%, indicating that these taxa represent a complex of several biological species. Other well-differentiated lineages (K2P distances between 5–10%) appeared within Hypsugo savii, Pipistrellus kuhlii and Plecotus auritus, suggesting the existence of further cryptic diversity. Most unsuspected lineages seem restricted to Iberia, although two have crossed the Pyrenees to reach, at leas...