Originally published August 6 2005
Butterflies share evolution secrets
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Scientists studying butterflies think they have found a clue to how one species becomes two.
Given our planet's rich biodiversity, "speciation" clearly happens regularly, but scientists cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it.
Now, researchers studying a family of butterflies think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed species.
The team, from Harvard University, US, discovered that closely related species living in the same geographical space displayed unusually distinct wing markings.
These wing colours apparently evolved as a sort of "team strip", allowing butterflies to easily identify the species of a potential mate.
For me, this is a big discovery just because the system is very beautiful Dr Nikolai Kandul, Harvard University This process, called "reinforcement", prevents closely related species from interbreeding thus driving them further apart genetically and promoting speciation.
"The phenomenon of reinforcement is one of the very few mechanisms that has natural selection playing a role in speciation," said Harvard co-author Nikolai Kandul.
The most obvious way this can happen is through geographical isolation.
Clearly, organisms do sometimes speciate even if there is no clear river or mountain separating them.
Reproductive isolation is much hazier and more difficult to pin down than geographic isolation, which is why biologists are so excited about this family of butterflies.
The Harvard team made the discovery while studying the butterfly genus Agrodiaetus, which has a wide ranging habitat in Asia.
The females are brown while the males exhibit a variety of wing colours ranging from silver and blue to brown.
Dr Kandul and his colleagues found that if closely related species of Agrodiaetus are geographically separate, they tend to look quite similar.
"This butterfly study presents evidence that the differences in the male's wing colouration is stronger [when the species share a habitat] than [when they do not]," said the speciation expert Axel Meyer, from Konstanz University in Germany.
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