Researchers measured natural selection in four Anolis lizard species in the wild for five consecutive time periods over three years. This long-term study in a community of lizards reveals how evolution unfolds in the wild across multiple species.
Charles Darwin said that evolution was constantly happening, causing animals to adapt for survival. But many of his contemporaries disagreed. If evolution is always causing things to change, they asked, then how is it that two fossils from the same species, found in the same location, can look identical despite being 50 million years apart in age?
Back in the lab, Stroud measured the lizards' heads, legs, feet, weight, and even the stickiness of their toes. After assigning an identifying number to each lizard and marking them with a tiny tag under the skin, the team released the lizards to the same branches where they'd found them. They went out in the following days and weeks to catch the rest of them.
The findings provided by Stroud's study had never been seen before. There had never been such insight into how selection works on a community level, and certainly not at this level of detail. According to Stroud, understanding evolution is critical to everything that we want to understand about life on Earth.
"For a very long time, evolutionary biologists have tried to figure out what was behind this paradox of stasis idea," Stroud said."What this study shows is that the answer may not be particularly complicated -- we just had to conduct a study in the wild for a long enough time to figure it out."James T. Stroud, Michael P. Moore, R. Brian Langerhans, Jonathan B. Losos.
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