Scientists see new species born

RichardR

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RichardR
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BBC story

Scientists at the University of Arizona may have witnessed the birth of a new species for the first time.

Biologists Laura Reed and Prof Therese Markow made the discovery by observing breeding patterns of fruit flies that live on rotting cacti in deserts.

The work could help scientists identify the genetic changes that lead one species to evolve into two species.

The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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I thought speciation had already been observed in fruit flies?
 
But the REAL question is, how did they hide out for so long after they left the ark?
 
RichardR said:
BBC story

I thought speciation had already been observed in fruit flies?
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I think the significance is the fact this speciation is being observed as it occurs in nature, and not induced in the lab.

(That wont stop them from saying "Whats so great about fruitfly coming from a fruitfly"... *preparing wall for upcoming head banging episode*)
 
Re: Re: Scientists see new species born

Yahweh said:

I think the significance is the fact this speciation is being observed as it occurs in nature, and not induced in the lab.

(That wont stop them from saying "Whats so great about fruitfly coming from a fruitfly"... *preparing wall for upcoming head banging episode*)
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Yeah, I won't start beleiving in this EVILution stuff 'til a GOAT GIVES BIRTH 2 A MONKY!!!!!!

Edited to add: Sorry about that. I forgot to take my meds this morning.
 
Re: Re: Re: Scientists see new species born

Brian the Snail said:
Yeah, I won't start beleiving in this EVILution stuff 'til a GOAT GIVES BIRTH 2 A MONKY!!!!!!
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Remarkably enough, there exist some fora on which this would be difficult to identify as parody.
 
I think there is some poetic license taken with this story. About three years ago I read a paper on a speciation event witnessed over several decades of a species of rock wallaby in Queensland, Australia. They theorised (and subsently found ample evidence) it had something to do with a virus that moved a transposon around a part of the population, hastening the genetic isolation of a population.

I've since read of several other examples found worldwide. So while this might be interesting, it is far from novel.

Athon
 
Re: Re: Scientists see new species born

Yahweh said:
I think the significance is the fact this speciation is being observed as it occurs in nature, and not induced in the lab.
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Found it! Yes and no:

Some of the most studied organisms in all of genetics are the Drosophila species, which are commonly known as fruitflies. Many Drosophila speciation events have been extensively documented since the seventies. Speciation in Drosophila has occurred by spatial separation, by habitat specialization in the same location, by change in courtship behavior, by disruptive natural selection, and by bottlenecking populations (founder-flush experiments), among other mechanisms.

Several speciation events have also been seen in laboratory populations of houseflies, gall former flies, apple maggot flies, flour beetles, Nereis acuminata (a worm), mosquitoes, and various other insects. Green algae and bacteria have been classified as speciated due to change from unicellularity to multicellularity and due to morphological changes from short rods to long rods, all the result of selection pressures.

Speciation has also been observed in mammals. Six instances of speciation in house mice on Madeira within the past 500 years have been the consequence of only geographic isolation, genetic drift, and chromosomal fusions.
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So is this wrong?
 
Scientists at the University of Arizona may have witnessed the birth of a new species for the first time.
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From the linked news story.

I think we can let the reporter off on a technicality. It is the first time that the scientists at the University of Arizona have witness this themselves. They read about it, but now they finally get to see it first hand.


...maybe?
 
I've been meaning to get to the library to check some references regarding witnessing birth of new species, in American Journal of Botany:

1950: vol 37, p. 487
1953: vol. 40, p. 788
1991: vol. 78, p. 1586
1995: vol. 82, p. 1329.

I think there have been articles about speciation of chichilid fish in Africa a few years back. There was an article in 2002 in Science magazine 298(5591):115-117 about witnessing speciation in mosquitos.
 
I'm curious to know what population size and how many generations of survival are required to qualify something as deserving of a new species name. Random mutations occur quite often and may be passed for a couple generations and die out due to non-viability over the long term.
 
My favorite "new species" example was the critter that can eat nylon. Nylon has only been around for a few decades, there's no way that critter was created 6,000 years ago. This was in the wild, not the lab.

The problem with creationists is that no matter what how dramatic an evolutionary change you find, they'll dismiss it as mere 'microevolution' and deny that one 'kind' could ever evolve into another 'kind', whatever 'kind' is supposed to mean.
 
My favorite "new species" example was the critter that can eat nylon. [...] This was in the wild, not the lab.
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Strangely enough, the bit I liked most was the fact that the event had been replicated in the lab:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7646041&dopt=Abstract
Through selective cultivation with 6-aminohexanoate linear dimer, a by-product of nylon-6 manufacture, as the sole source of carbon and nitrogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO, which initially has no enzyme activity to degrade this xenobiotic compound, was successfully expanded in its metabolic ability. Two new enzyme activities, 6-aminohexanoate cyclic dimer hydrolase and 6-aminohexanoate dimer hydrolase, were detected in the adapted strains.
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