Year: 2022

BETTER GATHERERS. “The researchers also tagged the birds to count the amount of times they visited the feeders, finding longer-beaked ones showed up at the feeders more often than their more stubby-beaked cousins.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

THE PEPPERED MOTH. “Yet the idea humans may be influencing evolution is not new. One well-known example involves moths that evolved a darker coloration as camouflage in the soot-covered backdrop of the industrial revolution.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

GALÁPAGOS FINCHES. “A human influence on beak-size evolution is not new, we have seen signs of this in finches on an inhabited island (Santa Cruz) of the Galápagos, but an association with bird feeders is new.” https://lnkd.in/ghWux7x View in LinkedIn

GEOLOGICAL VERSUS CONTEMPORANEOUS. “Ecologically significant evolutionary change, occurring over tens of generations or fewer, is now widely documented in nature. These findings counter the long-standing assumption that ecological and evolutionary processes occur on different time-scales.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

ANTHROPOGENIC IMPACT. “Contemporary evolution occurs in a wide diversity of ecological contexts, but appears to be especially common in response to anthropogenic changes in selection and population structure.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

WIDESPREAD PHENOMENA. “Across a wide range of taxa, this contemporary evolution has been observed in many biological contexts, on fine spatial scales, and in the presence of gene flow.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

START OF SPECIATION. “Moreover, strong selection on observable time frames has caused substantial differentiation among populations within species, in some cases enough to represent the early stages of speciation.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

CHANGING NATURAL SELECTION ITSELF. “Evolution may also occur quickly enough to alter the outcomes of ecological interactions and ecosystem-level processes, including those that generate selection in the first place.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first weekend fragment on the interesting recent observations of adaptation occurring in just a dozen generations rather than hundreds of thousands of years, as we have assumed. This rapid evolution is widespread. It is often triggered by human activity. The studies on blue tits have correlated the beak changes to gene changes and tied the bow on this interesting phenomenon. View in LinkedIn

EXTREME INNOVATION. “Even more radically inventive solutions can be expected when organisms have access to a rich variety of ready-made genes and gene complexes, as they do in real environments.” https://lnkd.in/djKBnru View in LinkedIn