The notion of islands as natural test beds of evolution is nearly as old as the theory itself. The restricted scale, isolation, and sharp boundaries of islands create unique selective pressures, often to dramatic effect. Following what's known as the "island rule," small animals evolve into outsize versions of their continental counterparts while large animals shrink. Giant tortoises and iguanas still inhabit the Galpagos and a few other remote islands today, but only fossils remain of the dwarf hippopotami, elephants, and deer that once lived on islands in Indonesia, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific Ocean. The fossil record suggests that these size changes occur rapidly after species become isolated on islands, but this long standing assumption has never been empirically examined in a systematic manner. Now, in a new study published in PLoS Biology, Virginie Millien confirms that island species undergo accelerated evolutionary changes over relatively short time frames, between decades and several thousand years.
Millien collected data from text, figures, and tables in an extensive survey of the published literature. From these datasets, she calculated a total of 826 evolutionary rates for 170 populations representing 88 species. Rates of evolutionary change, she found, decreased over time for both island and mainland species, with a slower rate of decrease for island species. The differences in evolutionary rates between island and mainland pairs also decreased over time, becoming statistically insignificant for intervals over 45,000 years. Overall, island species evolved faster than mainland species--a phenomenon that was most pronounced for intervals between 21 years through 20,000 years.
The finding that mammals evolve faster on islands, Millien argues, comports with the island evolution theory prediction that mammals respond to their new island homes with rapid morphological and size adaptations. The brisk pace of these changes may expla
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Contact: Natalie Bouaravong
press@plos.org
415-568-3445
Public Library of Science
11-Sep-2006