Module 11

 Speciation

    Speciation, or the act of a population branching off and becoming their own species through evolution, is something that's hard to have a definitive timeline on in my opinion. Speciation in my mind can happen fast or over a long period of time. The tricky part is deciding when their genetics have changed enough that they become their own species. For this you might look at phylogenetic trees to see where the branching off occurred, how far down that branch they are, and if any other species or types of the same species still exist. In a situation where a population's environment gets changed rapidly and stays in the new different conditions, it makes sense that the organisms in the population that are able to survive and adapt to the new changes would produce offspring that is very different from the normal organisms of a species in their normal habitat. In this case, I would expect speciation to happen much sooner than if there was a gradual change to the environment or any other sort of change that might make a population diverge from the normal genetics of its species. This kind of goes along with part of our R exercise this week, where the fish that were able to adapt to live in the toxic water would be expected to eventually create their own species over time. To add to this, it makes sense to me that speciation would occur faster in an allopatric situation, where there is some barrier between two different populations in a species. The peripatetic mode of speciation also seems like it would work faster, for the same reason. The sympatric and parapatric modes of speciation seem like eventually, a new species could arise over a long period of time, but much slower overall than total isolation of a population that is free to evolve and change in any way that would help it. No matter what mode of speciation happens, I can't imagine it would ever happen fast, but some modes seem like they would work faster than other modes.

Comments

  1. Taylor DavisonNovember 12, 2021 at 9:39 PM

    I really liked your discussion of environmental factors. Environmental factors seem to be one of the leading triggers to evolution and I think you presented a well put together analysis of how it can greatly affect the time for speciation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. KathrynNovember 14, 2021 at 3:28 PM

    I think it is great that you tied the R exercises back to the blog post and what we were learning about in class. It can be difficult to tie everything we're doing in class, the R exercises, discussions, and blogs together, but I think you displayed an in-depth understanding of how all these parts go together. Great job!

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