

The ecology of colonization as seen in the zoogeography of anoline lizards on small islands.

Zoogeography: the Geographical Distribution of Animals (Wiley, New York, 1957). The theory of speciation via the founder principle.

Genetic revolutions in relation to speciation phenomena: the founding of new populations. In addition to providing a glimpse of adaptive dynamics in one of the most extensive generic radiations on earth, the results lend support to the general argument that environment determines the evolution of morphology.Ĭarlquist, S. Further, the direction of differentiation followed an expectation based on the evolutionary diversification of insular Anolis over its entire geographic range. The more different the recipient island's vegetation from that of the source, the greater the magnitude of differentiation. Populations of the lizard Anolis sagrei, introduced onto small islands from a nearby source, differentiated from each other rapidly over a 10–14-year period. Here we report long-term results of just such an experimental study. Despite its fundamental importance, the consequence of colonization for traits of founding populations have primarily been surmised from static present-day distributions 1,2,4,5, laboratory experiments 6 and the outcomes of haphazard human introductions 7–9, rather than from replicated field experiments. If colonizing populations are displaced into an environment that is often very different from that of their source 1, they are particularly likely to diverge evolutionarily, the more so because they are usually small and thus likely to change by genetic restructuring or drift 2,3.
