Evolution Adaptive Radiation
Adaptive Radiation
Adaptive radiation occurs most often in new environment with a variety of different unfilled niches so that plants and animals that are not adapted to those areas can exploit the resources in the respective niches. Once individuals begin exploiting the new niches, mutations that will benefit the species will spread throughout the population via natural selection giving the owners an overwhelming advantage over others without the mutation and throughout evolutionary time a new species is established.
If sexual selection is linked to these mutations a new species can be established even faster.
For example if a few individuals of a seed eating bird were to start eating fruit due to a surplus of fruit in the environment a few mutations would appear to make them better fruit eaters, which also happen to coincide with a change in the birds aesthetics or song, then the fruit eating birds may decide to mate amongst each other rather than seed eaters. Furthermore even if seed and fruit eaters were to interbreed, the result could be a bird that is neither a dominant seed nor fruit eater and lose out to purebred seed and bird eaters. The hybrids would be eliminated by natural selection due to decreased output capacity. Natural selection will then result in more district plumage or songs of fruit eaters allowing them to be identified with other fruit eaters avoiding mating with seed eaters.
Other individuals of the same seed eating ancestral species may find nectar as a viable source of food and evolve over time via natural selection into a new species.
Adaptive radiation is when a single species evolves into a number of distinct yet closely related species.
Each new species is adapted to live in a different ecological niche. This process usually occurs when a variety of new resources are made available and are not used by any other species. An example would be Dwarven’s finches. There are 13 different species that live in the
Adaptive radiation occurs most often in new environment with a variety of different unfilled niches so that plants and animals that are not adapted to those areas can exploit the resources in the respective niches. Once individuals begin exploiting the new niches, mutations that will benefit the species will spread throughout the population via natural selection giving the owners an overwhelming advantage over others without the mutation and throughout evolutionary time a new species is established.
If sexual selection is linked to these mutations a new species can be established even faster.
For example if a few individuals of a seed eating bird were to start eating fruit due to a surplus of fruit in the environment a few mutations would appear to make them better fruit eaters, which also happen to coincide with a change in the birds aesthetics or song, then the fruit eating birds may decide to mate amongst each other rather than seed eaters. Furthermore even if seed and fruit eaters were to interbreed, the result could be a bird that is neither a dominant seed nor fruit eater and lose out to purebred seed and bird eaters. The hybrids would be eliminated by natural selection due to decreased output capacity. Natural selection will then result in more district plumage or songs of fruit eaters allowing them to be identified with other fruit eaters avoiding mating with seed eaters.
Other individuals of the same seed eating ancestral species may find nectar as a viable source of food and evolve over time via natural selection into a new species.
Adaptive radiation is when a single species evolves into a number of distinct yet closely related species.
Each new species is adapted to live in a different ecological niche. This process usually occurs when a variety of new resources are made available and are not used by any other species. An example would be Dwarven’s finches. There are 13 different species that live in the