News: Darwin told us so - Researcher shows natural selection speeds up speciation

Darwin told us so: Researcher shows natural selection speeds up speciation

In the first experiment of its kind conducted in nature, a University of
British Columbia evolutionary biologist has come up with strong evidence for
one of Charles Darwin's cornerstone ideas - adaptation to the environment
accelerates the creation of new species.

"A single adaptive trait such as color could move a population towards the
process of forming a new species, but adaptation in many traits may be
required to actually complete the formation of an entirely new species,"
says UBC post-doctoral fellow Patrik Nosil, whose study is published today
in the online journal PLoS ONE. "The more ways a population can adapt to its
unique surroundings, the more likely it will ultimately diverge into a
separate species."

Nosil studied walking-stick insects in the Santa Barbara Chaparral in
southern California. Stick insects cannot fly and live and feed on their
host plants. Different "eco-types" of walking-stick insects are found on
different plants and exhibit different color patterns that match the
features of their host plants. For example, insects of the cristinae
eco-type, which feed on plants with needle-like leaves, have a white line
along their green bodies.

By displacing some eco-types away from their customary host plants and
protecting others from their natural predators, Nosil found that color
pattern alone could initiate speciation, while natural selection on
additional adaptive traits such as the ability to detoxify different
host-plant chemicals are required to "seal the deal," or complete the
speciation process initiated by differences in color pattern.

"Natural selection has been widely regarded as the cause of adaptation
within existing species while genetics and geography have been the focus of
most current research on the driving force of speciation," says Nosil.

"As far as advancing Darwin's theory that natural selection is a key driver
of speciation, this is the first experiment of its kind done outside of a
lab setting. The findings are exciting," says Nosil.

The PLoS One paper, co-authored by Cristina Sandoval of the University of
California at Santa Barbara, is available at
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0001907 .

Source: University of British Columbia
http://www.physorg.com/news126351589.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


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