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Defining Speciation Speciation is a lineage-splitting event that produces two or more separate species. Imagine that you are looking at a tip of the tree of life that constitutes a species of fruit fly. Move down the phylogeny to where your fruit fly twig is connected to the rest of the tree. That branching point, and every other branching point on the tree, is a speciation event. At that point genetic changes resulted in two separate fruit fly lineages, where previously there had just been one lineage. But why and how did it happen? The branching points on this partial Drosophila phylogeny represent long past speciation events. Here is one scenario that exemplifies how speciation can happen: The scene: a population of wild fruit flies minding its own business on several Disaster strikes: A hurricane washes the bananas and the immature fruit flies they bunches of rotting bananas, cheerfully laying their eggs in the mushy fruit... contain out to sea. The banana bunch eventually washes up on an island off the coast of the mainland. The fruit flies mature and emerge from their slimy nursery onto the lonely island. The two portions of the population, mainland and island, are now too far apart for gene flow to unite them. At this point, speciation has not occurred—any fruit flies that got back to the mainland could mate and produce healthy offspring with the mainland flies. The populations diverge: Ecological conditions are slightly different on the island, So we meet again: When another storm reintroduces the island flies to the and the island population evolves under different selective pressures and experiences different random events than the mainland population does. Morphology, food preferences, and courtship displays change over the course of many generations of natural selection. mainland, they will not readily mate with the mainland flies since they’ve evolved different courtship behaviors. The few that do mate with the mainland flies, produce inviable eggs because of other genetic differences between the two populations. The lineage has split now that genes cannot flow between the populations. This is a simplified model of speciation by geographic isolation, but it gives an idea of some of the processes that might be at work in speciation. In most real-life cases, we can only put together part of the story from the available evidence. However, the evidence that this sort of process does happen is strong. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/VBDefiningSpeciation.shtml 1. What is the organism? 2. What are three traits that the organism has? (wings, body color, eye color, mating dance,) 3. What are the variations for those three traits? (for example: thick stripes vs. thin stripes) 4. What was the geographical isolating event for the fruit flies? 5. Draw and explain how this isolating mechanism will separate the populations, and how the 2 environments are different from each other. What can they not do anymore? 6. Explain how natural selection is pressuring the variations on the separated populations. Be specific about how the it will favor (or not favor) the some of the traits you chose. How will the traits be beneficial in the new environment in which the organisms find themselves? 7. Draw what the future organisms of the separated populations would look like in the future if the environmental pressures continued. 8. How would you know that these individuals were now separate species? Hint: think about the definition of species. What has happened to make them separate species? 9. This example shows how one species changed over time into two separate species. This is called divergent evolution; two species share a common ancestor, but have become more different over time. Can you give another example in nature that shows how 2 species have diverged from a common ancestor. Explain what happened using evidence such as homologous bone structures. 10. Adaptive radiation is a type of divergent evolution where one species is changed into many species in a quick period of time. This usually happens on islands where there are many different environments and lots of empty niches to be filled. The Galapagos Finches illustrate this. Can you explain how this might have happened? 11. Convergent evolution is when unrelated organisms evolve to have similar phenotypes due to living in the same environment or having a similar niche. They have analogous body structures. Examples include all flying organisms, such as insects and birds; both use wings to catch food and escape predators, but these wings are not built the same way. Can you describe another example of convergent evolution, and explain why it occurred?