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posted by azrael on Saturday October 25 2014, @04:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the survival-of-the-fittest dept.

With a name straight out of a horror movie, The Spoil Islands in the Mosquito Lagoon off the coast of Florida, a by-product of dredging in the area to make the Intra-coastal Waterway in the 1950s, served as the prime site for an experimental evolution study.

By the 1990s, flora and fauna from the mainland—including the Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis), a small arboreal lizard—had colonized the islands.

In May 1995, Yoel Stuart of the University of Texas and Todd Campbell, of from the University of Tampa, chose six islands with resident populations of the Carolina anole and recorded the height at which the lizards were perched. He then introduced small populations of the Brown anole (Anolis sagrei)—native to Cuba and the Bahamas to three of the islands, leaving the other three islands undisturbed.

This wasn't the first place where these lizard species have met. In other shared habitats, it was found that the Carolina anole was always found much higher in the trees, had larger adhesive toepads because they have more lamellae, grooves that allow the digits to stick better to surfaces.

The researchers wanted to see if the same adaptations would result due to competitive pressure, and if so how long it might take.

Sure enough, the brown anole populations grew rapidly, and after just three months, the Carolina anoles began perching at greater heights. On the control islands, however, the Carolina anole was making full use of its typical habitat: the entire tree, from the ground to the crown.

That wasn't the surprising part. Such results could be explained by phenotypic plasticity, the ability of an organism to change its traits in response to changes in the environment. Such changes do not signal a genetic or evolutionary change.

To rule out phenotypic plasticity, the researchers sought to establish whether the larger, stickier toepads were passed on to the next generation. So the team collected gravid females from invaded islands and non-invaded islands in 2011, raising their offspring in identical conditions. The larger, stickier toepads persisted in the lab-bred offspring conceived on the invaded islands.

“The evidence for an evolutionary change surprised me”, said Stuart. “The pace at which the change was happening surprised me even more.”

The change, all in a matter of 15 years, is even quicker than the change in Mountain Goats that we covered here on SN. But in that study, the authors concluded that the change was not genetic, but rather merely resource driven phenotypic plasticity.

Related Stories

Climate Change Causing Mountain Goats to Shrink 9 comments

The Center for American Progress reports:

New research has found that climate change is causing mountain goats living in the Alps to shrink. The study, which was published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Zoology, found that adolescent Alpine chamois mountain goats are significantly smaller than their peers were 30 years ago, weighing about 25 percent less than goats in the 1980s did. The researchers called this change in body mass over 3 decades "striking". They also said the shrinking "appears to be strongly linked" with increased temperatures in the growing season of the goats' Alpine habitats.

The study noted that climate change has been linked to changes in body mass of other species before. But in those situations, the mass change was typically due to a change in the amount of food available or in the timing in which food was available--changes in bud burst timing in the spring, for instance. That wasn't the case in the goats' situation, however.

They have modified their behaviour and avoid foraging during the warmest part of the day so that they don't overheat.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @04:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @04:38PM (#109979)

    Where is the article?

    The only links in the summary are to google maps, wikipedia and soylent itself.

    Seems to be press release from the university here. [utexas.edu]

    I'd like to have seen some analysis from another source than the university itself.

  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @05:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @05:21PM (#110007)

    While rapid evolution is intriguing, rapid devolution is much more interesting to investigate.

    Just look at Linux, for example. It started from meager beginnings in the early 1990s, but then quickly ramped up to become the premiere UNIX-like OS for servers and workstations by the late 1990s. It provided a superb environment up until about 2008. Then it all started going downhill from there. We had PulseAudio pushed on us, which fucked up our audio for years on end, and it's still causing severe problems for some of us even today. Then we had GNOME 3 forced on us. Then we had Firefox's Australis forced on us. Now we're having systemd forced on us. And lots of people now think that JavaScript is a "good" programming language! All of this software is total shit, and a big step backward from what we had before it. In just a few short years, decades of software advances have been wiped away. This is something that scientists should be investigating!

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @09:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @09:41PM (#110083)

      forced on us

      You are obviously using a different Linux than I am.
      Perhaps you aren't using Linux at all and are merely shilling on behalf of an evil corporation based in Redmond, WA.

      The Linux I use has a guy named Torvalds at the helm.
      Other folks have taken his kernel and made hundreds and hundreds of individualized implementations of what is a very adaptable operating system that can be used on an incredibly wide range of hardware.
      Some folks might call that "evolution".
      (There's also no such thing as "de-evolution".
      Evolution doesn't have a goal line.
      It's not always obvious what change -might- be advantageous later;
      on top of that, things that appear to be an advantage today might be a hindrance next year.)

      Now, grasp your mouse between your thumb and fingers and move it until the cursor (that tiny little arrow picture) is over one of the "hyperlinks" below.
      Hold down your Ctrl key and use your index finger to click the left button on your mouse.
      You will be taken to something that is less "total shit" than what you are using (or are claiming to be using).
      Gentoo [gentoo.org] Slackware [slackware.com] CRUX [crux.nu] Funtoo [funtoo.org]
      LSD (Less systemd Linux) [forums.gs] Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]

      There's also this: systemd-shim [debian.org]

      Additionally, a Linux "distro" will use the desktop environment that YOU choose.
      YOU select the apps too.
      If YOU don't have what YOU want, it's because YOU screwed up.

      ...and an operating system that is more configurable to individual preferences than Linux is would be an interesting discovery.

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @11:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25 2014, @11:02PM (#110098)

        As root, I recently ran "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" on my Debian unstable system. Without me being asked, and without me asking, systemd was installed. As far as I'm concerned, systemd was forced on me.

        I shouldn't have to switch to some half-assed distro. Rather, systemd should be removed from Debian. It doesn't belong there in the first place.

        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @01:42AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @01:42AM (#110129)

          The debian people discussed this too and decided that that is how it should be done. It's no accident. Anyone who opposes them are trolls tho. 2 years in jail in the uk.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @11:00AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @11:00AM (#110204)

      While rapid evolution is intriguing, rapid devolution is much more interesting to investigate.

      Honey Boo Boo?

  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday October 25 2014, @06:27PM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 25 2014, @06:27PM (#110032)

    Y'all need to remember this is a pretty poor showing for nature when you consider how much evolution God accomplished in seven days (well, six actually, plus one day of sitting back and admiring how well it all turned out - all of which was before he made woman).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @12:48AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 26 2014, @12:48AM (#110121)

      If I were omnipotent I could have done it in 3 days. I'd have charged less too.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 26 2014, @09:13PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday October 26 2014, @09:13PM (#110337) Journal

      Well, actually god was sitting there the full seventh day and thinking: "Hmmm ... something's missing ... I just can't figure out what it is."

      Until Adam complained that he's lonely, and wouldn't accept any of the animals as solution to his loneliness. Then finally god figured out what he had forgotten.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29 2014, @04:42PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29 2014, @04:42PM (#111236)

        Then Eve opened her mouth and wouldn't stop yammering. Shortly thereafter Adam regretting not just being happy banging the sheep.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday October 26 2014, @12:06PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Sunday October 26 2014, @12:06PM (#110213) Journal

    The best prior study I read was about animals evolving to be black to better blend in with trees and buildings darkened by coal soot. This is better. If others undertake experiments of this kind it will put paid to creationists once and for all. Well, with reasonable people, anyway. Religionists are never discouraged by data.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.