Heritable micro-environmental variance covaries with fitness in an outbred population of Drosophila serrata

The genetic basis of stochastic variation within a defined environment, and the consequences of such micro-environmental variance for fitness are poorly understood. Using a multigenerational breeding design in Drosophila serrata, we demonstrated that the micro-environmental variance in a set of morphological wing traits in a randomly mating population had significant additive genetic variance in most single wing traits. Although heritability was generally low