Most people will be familiar with Australia's unique set of mega- (and not so mega) fauna such as kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, dingoes, wombats, marsupial mice, and of course the egg-laying monotremes, the platypus and the echidna or spiny ant-eater, but how many people are aware of the equally unique and often bizarre array of invertebrates, apart from the dangerous spiders, that is?
In this article in The Conversation, 'Photos from the Field' series, from January 2021 Nick Porch, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Earth Science, Deakin University, Australia, shares some photographs of a small sample of the several hundred thousand uniquely Australian organisms, most of which will be almost completely unknown, even to Australians.
Creationists might like to ignore the bits about 150 million years, Gondwana and allusions to plate tectonics, in the explanation for why Australian bugs tend to be more closely related to South American bugs than those from New Zealand. Evidence of evolution on an old Earth will probably upset them.
The article is reprinted here under a Creative commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original can be read here:
Panamanian golden frog, Atelopus zeteki, a victim of the fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.
On the face of it, there is no connection between frogs and malaria, but scientists have discovered a correlation between the decline of frogs due to the fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, and a spike in malaria cases in parts of Latin America, particularly in Costa Rica and Panama.
To be a Creationists is to believe this fungus, the effects it is having on global amphibian populations and the knock-on effects this is having on the ecosystem and human health, is the intended outcome of a supernatural intelligent [sic] designer, with this obviously malevolent intent.
I also write about this fungus in my popular, illustrated book, The malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, as an example of what can only be described as malevolent intent, if the modification to this otherwise harmless soil fungus to turn it against the world's amphibians, really was the work of Creationists' putative intelligent [sic] designer, as their dogma obliges them to believe.
The mystery, as ever, is why Creationists would prefer us to see their favourite god as a malevolent monster, forever scheming to increase the amount of suffering in the world, rather than ascribe these things to a natural process with no mind or morality involved.
The same UC Davis team has now reported a close correlation between the major die-off of amphibians in Costa Rica and Panama with a spike in malaria cases in the region. At the spike’s peak, up to 1 person per 1,000 annually contracted malaria that normally would not have had the amphibian die-off not occurred, the study found.
How do you convince the climate change denying loonies to believe the evidence of their own eyes?
It's about as hard as convincing a Creationist that evidence-based science is right and evidence-free superstitions is wrong, as this article in The Conversation by Rachael Sharman, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, and Professor Patrick D. Nunn, Professor of Geography, School of Law and Society, both of the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, explains. It is about their research into the causes of climate scepticism in Australia, but the findings have a wider application, especially in the USA where scepticism is high, following the scientifically illiterate Donald Trump's lead, and the pro-Trump, QAnon conspiracy theorists' disinformation campaign.
Their article is reprinted under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.
Researchers see signs of destabilisation already in parts of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, in permafrost regions, the Amazon rainforest, and potentially the Atlantic overturning circulation as well.
Photo: Katrin Lindbäck/azotelibrary.com
14. The Meaning of Life
You are the end-point of your own genes' evolution. You are the descendant of survivors, each of whom bred successfully and never once failed – for 3.5 billion years!
Think about that for a moment. In a world in which, for very many individuals, an early death and failure to breed were by far the most likely outcome, not one single one of your ancestors failed to produce at least one offspring. If they had failed, your gene-line would have ended there and then.
You are the product of billions of passes through the sieve of selection and at every pass your gene-line passed the fitness test. Your genes are good at surviving; and you are unique in the history of the cosmos. The likelihood of you being alive at all is almost vanishingly small and yet here you are. Never before has anyone with your combination of genes, your collection of atoms and your history existed.
And you never will again.
Almost all your genes have spent much longer being something else than they have being human. Your ancestors were there when Europe and Africa split off from the Americas. They were there as small mammal-like reptiles when dinosaurs ruled the earth. They saw pterodactyls flying overhead. They survived the mass-extinction which ended the dinosaurs’ reign and they saw the birds and the bats grow wings and take to the air.
Your ancestors swam in the Cambrian seas and crawled out onto the land as early air-gulping fish destined to become four–legged animals with lungs. Your ancestors lived through the Carboniferous era when dense forests of tree ferns grew in steaming jungles where dragonflies with meter-wide wings flew. They saw the trees fall and form the piles of vegetation destined to be coal as the climate changed and the Carboniferous forests collapsed. They saw the first flowering plants as plants and insects formed their mutual-benefit society.
A hopping mouse of the Notomys genus. Hopping mice have evolved highly efficient kidneys to deal with the low water environments of Australia’s deserts.
I've remarked before about how well the Theory of Evolution as an explanation for the biodiversity in animals, plants and fungi we see all around us, consistently meshes with other strands of science. For example, plate tectonic and the timing of the splits and collisions of land masses that have occurred exactly coincides with the deduced evolutionary divergence in major branches of the tree of life, so explaining the relationships between species on unconnected land masses such as Africa and South America or Europe and North America.
Here we have an account of the colonisation of Australia and New Guinea and neighbouring islands by rodents, and their evolutionary diversification, that exactly meshes with the rise and fall of sea level during cycles of glaciation and glacial regression, and with known periods of mountain building in New Guinea that transformed it from a group of small islands into a single large mountainous island.
The study, led by Dr. Emily Roycroft, a postdoctoral research fellow with the Australian National University's Division of Ecology and Evolution, Research School of Biology, Acton, ACT, Australia, and Pierre-Henri Fabre, of the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution, Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France, with colleagues from the Australian National University, and the Science Department, Museums Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, is published in the journal,Current Biology. Sadly, the main body of the paper is behind a paywall, despite the journals claimed support for open access publishing. However the abstract is available here.
Lead author, Dr Emily Roycroft has also written about their research in the open access online magazine The Conversation which, if you want factual, objective analysis of news, is well worth reading. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original article can be read here.
(A) General location and local geography of the Milne Fiord epishelf lake in 2015 (adapted from reference 7). Gray areas of map indicate lake ice detected by RADARSAT-2 imagery. (B) Cartoon showing accumulation of freshwater behind Milne Ice Shelf and the bottom topography of Neige Bay.
Readers may recall how I wrote very recently about a 'giant virus' that is designed to infect and kill an amoeba, but whatever designed it, also designed a bacterium to defend the amoeba from it, in a seemingly pointless excercise in design for no apparent reason. That's if you see everything in terms of the childish intelligent [sic] design hoax.
Now scientists have discovered another 'giant' virus' that lives in a remote arctic lake and does nothing other than kill the cyanobacteria that also live there, which, presumably, Creationists believe were designed by the same designer who designed the 'giant virus'.
If you can't see the flaw in the reasoning that this must have been designed by a intelligent designer, then it's highly likely that you have fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax yourself, or your definition of 'intelligent' is at odds with the way the rest of the English-speaking world uses it.
Just a quick reminder about these "giant viruses": These are a goup of very large viruses that are several times larger than normal visues such as the COVI-19-causing SARS-CoV-2. They have a relatively complex genome which includes genes normally only found in cellular animals, plants and fungi. They are harmlees to humans since they only infect single-celled organisms such as amoebae and, in this case, cyanobacteria. They are relatively common in a marine environment and can have an impact at the lowest level of the food chain by killing the organisms that recycle nutrients from dead organisms from higher up the food chain. How and why they got their complex genomes is the current subject of study, but may be the result of horizontal gene transfer during evolutionary arms races between them and their hosts.
The discovery was made by microbiologists from Université Laval, Québec, Québec, Canada. Their findings are published, open access in the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology. How the discovery was made and its significance in terms of climate change are explained in the ASM news release:
Hyde Reef on the central Great Barrier Reef. Scientists have recorded the highest levels of coral cover in 36 years in parts of the reef.
Photograph: Australian Institute of Marine Science
One of the most biodiverse marine environments on Earth is Australia's Great Barrier Reef which has been in the news recently as an ecosystem under severe threat from climate-change related problems such as global warming and severe tropical cyclones, as well as the expanding range of the Crown of thorns starfish, which feeds on living coral, destroying large areas of it.
However, recent news seems to indicate that the central and northern sections of the Great Barrier Reef are showing encouraging signs of recovery, although the southern section remains under threat.
But the news might not be as good as the pictures seem to indicate, as Dr. Zoe Richards, PhD, senior research fellow at Curtain University, Western Australia and Marine Invertebrate Curator, Western Australian Museum, explains in an article in The Conversation. Her article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Record coral cover doesn’t necessarily mean the Great Barrier Reef is in good health (despite what you may have heard)
In what seems like excellent news, coral cover in parts of the Great Barrier Reef is at a record high, according to new data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science. But this doesn’t necessarily mean our beloved reef is in good health.
In the north of the reef, coral cover usually fluctuates between 20% and 30%. Currently, it’s at 36%, the highest level recorded since monitoring began more than three decades ago.
This level of coral cover comes hot off the back of a disturbing decade that saw the reef endure six mass coral bleaching events, four severe tropical cyclones, active outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish, and water quality impacts following floods. So what’s going on?
High coral cover findings can be deceptive because they can result from only a few dominant species that grow rapidly after disturbance (such as mass bleaching). These same corals, however, are extremely susceptible to disturbance and are likely to die out within a few years.
The Great Barrier Reef Long-Term Monitoring annual summary | AIMS.
The data are robust
The Great Barrier Reef spans 2,300 kilometres, comprising more than 3,000 individual reefs. It is an exceptionally diverse ecosystem that features more than 12,000 animal species, plus many thousand more species of plankton and marine flora.
The reef has been teetering on the edge of receiving an “in-danger” listing from the World Heritage Committee. And it was recently described in the State of the Environment Report as being in a poor and deteriorating state.
Its approach involves surveying a selection of reefs that represent different habitat types (inshore, midshelf, offshore) and management zones. The latest report provides a robust and valuable synopsis of how coral cover has changed at 87 reefs across three sectors (north, central and south) over the past 36 years.
2018: A bare patch of reef at Jiigurru, Lizard Island in 2018 after most of the corals died in the 2016/2017 coral bleaching event.
Andy Lewis, Author provided.
2022: By 2022, the same patch of reef was covered by a vibrant array of plating Acropora corals.
Andy Lewis, Author provided.
The results
Overall, the long-term monitoring team found coral cover has increased on most reefs. The level of coral cover on reefs near Cape Grenville and Princess Charlotte Bay in the northern sector has bounced back from bleaching, with two reefs having more than 75% cover.
In the central sector, where coral cover has historically been lower than in the north and south, coral cover is now at a region-wide high, at 33%.
The southern sector has a dynamic coral cover record. In the late 1980s coral cover surpassed 40%, before dropping to a region-wide low of 12% in 2011 after Cyclone Hamish.
The region is currently experiencing outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish. And yet, coral cover in this area is still relatively high at 34%.
“Mature coral coverage”?
Rapid increases in cover in parts of the northern and central #GreaBarrierReef since mass coral bleaching in 2016/7 are driven by larval recruitment and fast growth of juvenile weedy corals.
Based on this robust data set, which shows increases in coral cover indicative of region-wide recovery, things must be looking up for the Great Barrier Reef – right?
Are we being catfished by coral cover?
In the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s report, reef recovery relates solely to an increase in coral cover, so let’s unpack this term.
Coral cover is a broad proxy metric that indicates habitat condition. It’s relatively easy data to collect and report on, and is the most widely used monitoring metric on coral reefs.
The finding of high coral cover may signify a reef in good condition, and an increase in coral cover after disturbance may signify a recovering reef.
Acropora hyacinthus, a pioneering species of coral at Lizard Island.
Zoe Richards, Author provided
But in this instance, it’s more likely the reef is being dominated by only few species, as the report states that branching and plating Acropora species have driven the recovery of coral cover.
Acropora coral are renowned for a “boom and bust” life cycle. After disturbances such as a cyclone, Acropora species function as pioneers. They quickly recruit and colonise bare space, and the laterally growing plate-like species can rapidly cover large areas.
Fast-growing Acropora corals tend to dominate during the early phase of recovery after disturbances such as the recent series of mass bleaching events. However, these same corals are often susceptible to wave damage, disease or coral bleaching and tend to go bust within a few years.
Juvenile branching Acropora colonising bare space after a bleaching event.
Zoe Richards, Author provided
Inferring that a reef has recovered by a person being towed behind a boat to obtain a rapid visual estimate of coral cover is like flying in a helicopter and saying a bushfire-hit forest has recovered because the canopy has grown back.
It provides no information about diversity, or the abundance and health of other animals and plants that live in and among the trees, or coral.
Cautious optimism
My study, published last year, examined 44 years of coral distribution records around Jiigurru, Lizard Island, at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef.
It suggested that 28 of 368 species of hard coral recorded at that location haven’t been seen for at least a decade, and are at risk of local extinction.
Lizard Island is one location where coral cover has rapidly increased since the devastating 2016-17 bleaching event. Yet, there is still a real risk local extinctions of coral species have occurred.
Without more information at the level of individual species, it is impossible to understand how much of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost, or recovered, since the last mass bleaching event.
Based on the coral cover data, it’s tempting to be optimistic. But given more frequent and severe heatwaves and cyclones are predicted in the future, it’s wise to be cautious about the reef’s perceived recovery or resilience.
Rainbow parrotfish on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.
Reef fish evolved the ability to feed by biting prey from surfaces relatively recently, a UC Davis study shows. The innovation has driven an explosion of evolution in reef fish.
Getty Images
One of the many fascinating aspects of evolution is the way that, when a new capability evolves, it can lead to a rapid radiation of new species as that capability opens access to new niches. For example, the evolution of flight in mammals and birds led to rapid radiation and speciation into all the bats and flying birds, respectively.
In the case of fish, the ability to bite rather than suck is a relatively recently evolved ability that led to a radiation of new species of fish that graze on surfaces such as the feeding method seen in very many different species of fish living on coral reefs, within the last 60 million years.
There may have been some biting done by teleosts before the end-Cretaceous, but our reconstructions suggest that it was very uncommon.
Katherine Corn, lead author
Graduate student
Department of Evolution and Ecology and Center for Population Biology
University of California Davis
Davis, CA, USA.
In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) recently, a research team led by Katherine Corn, of the Department of Evolution and Ecology and Center for Population Biology at the University of California at Davis, CA, USA, with colleagues from the Department of Biological Sciences, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA, report finding that, feeding by grazing, nibbling or gnawing food off rocks and corals didn’t appear among the teleosts (the group that includes most bony fish) until after the dinosaur-killing mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 60 million years ago.
A stark reminder of the effects of climate change and the danger this represents to life on Earth, was published recently in the form of a study into the effects of global warming on the population of bumblebees in North America. The study was conducted by scientists from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada, led by Hanna Jackson, in collaboration with scientists from the U.S.-based Pollinator Partnership, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California.
Their findings were published, open access, in the Royal Society's Biology Letter
bumblebees are essential pollinators on which many plants depend for their reproduction and without which many plants would not produce the next generation. They are also essential for pollinating a number of human food crops from oilseed rape to fruit, so a significant loss of bumblebees would be economically catastrophic.
The Simon Fraser University press release explains the team's methodology and main findings:
Population genomic structure in six codistributed Amazonian bird species groups. For each species, results of the best k value for STRUCTURE analysis of split datasets (left) and example replicates of the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) analysis (right) are shown. Colored bars underneath the STRUCTURE plots and circles on the t-SNE plots are colored on the basis of major interfluvial regions in map 1 (top left). Map 2 (top right) shows the topography of the study region within the dark red box, where yellow contours represent the 250- to 300-m elevational zone demarcating dynamic lowland (>250 m; shaded in blue) from relatively stable upland (>300 m; shaded in red) basins. Map 3 (top right inset) shows precipitation during the driest annual quarter (76), with high precipitation in gray, low precipitation in red, and a strong cline across the middle to lower reaches of the rivers draining the Brazilian Shield (plotted using QGIS).
The major driver of evolutionary diversity is environmental change because it is the environment the species finds itself in that selects for fitness to survive and reproduce in that environment. This is why species can superficially look as though they are designed to suit their particular environment.
So, it is not surprising that a group of scientists led by Dr. Lukas Musher of the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Graduate School found that changes in the local environment in the Amazon River basin are what led to the rich biodiversity in the Amazon Rain Forest. What was surprising, however, was the fact that it was dynamic changes in the courses of the many small tributaries to the Amazon that were the major factor and that proliferating bird species were the result, despite the fact that small rivers do not present major barriers to flying birds.
The team also discovered that this dynamic system had produced several local micro-species along the banks of these rivers, which are vulnerable to extinction.
From the American Museum of Natural History press release:
One of the most contentious questions in evolutionary biology is, how did the Amazon become so rich in species?
A new study focused on birds examines how the movements of rivers in the Amazon have
Long-term readers of this blog my recall how I wrote about a fungal infection, chytridiomycosis, that is devastating populations of frogs and other amphibians throughout the world. I concluded that, if as Creationists claim, these organisms are intelligently designed by a god, to do exactly what they do, the only conclusion was that this putative god must hate frogs and is trying to exterminate them, without going to the extremes it went to when it decided to exterminate another of its mistakes - humans - when in a fit of pique and a loss of self-control, it drowned everything else too.
In that earlier blog from October 2013, I described how scientists had discovered just how clever the designer of the fungus had been. It had taken a common, normally harmless soil fungus of the widespread chytrid family, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and modified it to not only infect the skin of amphibians but to paralyse their immune systems too, making it easier to kill its victims by thickening their skin so they are no longer able to breathe through it, and then use their dead bodies to make more fungi, to kill more amphibians. Sheer, genius, eh?
Now, nine years later, scientists working for the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA (UC Santa Barbara), Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana, Mexico and Conservación de Fauna del Noroeste, A.C., Ensenada, Baja California, have discovered that, not only is the devastation continuing in both Southern California and Baja California but that there is something going on in Baja California that is enabling Bd to hit the frogs there much harder than it is hitting them in Southern California, despite the fact that the species are the same and the environment is very similar.
Researchers from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, in collaboration with East China Normal University, show that Escherichia coli cells become spherical when grown in conditions mimicking a primordial environment.
The point of this piece of research is not only what it tells us about the probable morphology of the earliest cells but what happened next.
It has long been assumed that the earliest cells would have been the simplest structures for maximal exchange of nutrients and waste with their environment and this would have been small spheres, since these give the maximal surface area to volume ratio. However, that remained an assumption until this experiment showed how a primordial environment would have favoured it.
The really interesting thing, however, is how the resultant organisms continued to diversify into, in this case, six distinct lines, with different sets of mutations all being selected to give the same advantages in that environment. This is perhaps best explained by the Tsukuba University press release:
Creationist frauds flatter their willing marks by telling them the scientific Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis, so scientists are coming to see their superstition as correct after all. This makes them feel they know more than the millions of biomedical scientists who spend their working lives applying the TOE to interpret and explain the biological data, all without having to bother with learning very much. It also enables the frauds to get away with a false dichotomy fallacy rather than show evidence for their god claim.
The extent to which this falsehood has penetrated public opinion in the USA can be gauged by two polls. One of members of the American Academy of Science on the statement, "Humans and other living things have evolved over time" (95% agreed, rising to 99% of biomedical members) and a 2015 Pew Research Poll on the question, "Do scientists generally agree about evolution?" where only 66% thought they did (29% thought they disagreed!). Public perception of the degree of scientific support for evolution is thus very different in the USA to the actual support.
In this paper we can see how biologists take the TOE as fundamental to any explanation of the data and how the data only makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Never, at any point, is a mystery settled for as unknowable or is data taken as evidence of an unproven, supernatural entity, plucked from one or other of Earth's many cultural origin myths.
Another example today of why maintaining biodiversity is important...
Scientists have isolated a chemical from the leaves of the European sweet chestnut tree which could prove invaluable in our arms race with MRSA. They have called this substance, castaneroxy A, after the Latin name for the sweet chestnut tree, Castanea sativa.
Scanning electron micrographs of Fensomea setacea, gen. & sp. nov. (GeoB*184) in (A, B) ventral view, (C) left lateral view, (D) right lateral view, (E) dorsal view, and (F) ventral apical view. Scale bars = 5 µm.
Here is yet another example of scientists refuting Creationist dogma simply by discovering the facts. This is easily done of course, without the slightest intent on the part of the scientists because the facts are invariably at odds with evidence-free, superstition-based Creationism, so we would expect the facts and the truth to expose the fallacies and lies Creationist frauds fool their credulous dupes with.
In this case, the dogma refuted is that there are no missing links. The facts reported by the scientists based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany, is that they have discovered a 'missing link' between the two major phylogenetic groups of unicellular algae known as the dinophytes or dinoflagellates, which sheds new light on the evolution of these organisms.
Missing links at the unicellular organism level might not sound significant to those who, like Creationists, don't understand taxonomic levels, but they are no less significant, or 'transitional', than would be 'missing links' between, for example, chimpanzees and hominins or between old world monkeys and the African great apes. The point is that these organisms lie at the origin of two different taxonomies or branches of the evolutionary tree.
As the Ludwig-Maxillians University news release explains:
The “bessbug” beetle not only eats its own poop, known as frass, but also uses the material to line the walls of its log-based galleries and to build protective chambers around its young. UC Berkeley scientists have discovered that the frass contains antibiotic and antifungal chemicals produced by actinomycete bacteria, helping to protect the insect from pathogens.
Credit: UC Berkeley photo by Rita de Cassia Pessotti
Exactly what potential resources there are in nature can only be guessed at - which is why conservation is so important, not just for the sake of biodiversity on 'spaceship' Earth, but to conserve stuff that could be essential to our long-term survival. Who would have guessed, for example, that the excrement of a beetle would contain potentially powerful antibiotics and fungicides, but that's exactly what a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have discovered.
In an entirely unsurprising finding, a group of researchers led by Professor Tobias Uller of Lund University, Sweden, believe they have explained the present range and diversity of wall lizards in the Mediterranean region as the result of major environmental changes caused by changes in the climate and sea-level about 6 million years ago.
This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the way a changing environment is the main driver of evolution and diversification.
This is also an example of how the TOE is supported by different strands of science, since it predicts that periods of significant evolution will be accompanied by periods of significant environmental change.
A chronogram of both Brassicales families (Upper) and Pierinae butterfly genera (Lower), showing species numbers and identification of clades in the adjacent table. A common temporal scale is provided between the two chronograms. The branches in the Brassicales phylogeny are colored to indicate the origin of indolic glucosinolates (purple), methionine derived glucosinolates (green), and novel structural elaborations to glucosinolates unique to the core Brassicaceae lineage (orange). Vertical dashed lines also indicate the origin of these novel chemical groups. Primary host–plant associations of various Pierinae lineages are similarly colored: orange (Brassicaceae), green (Capparaceae or Cleomaceae), orange-green (mixture of previous), purple (more basal Brassicales that synthesize indolic glucosinolates), blue (non-Brassicales feeding) and gray (unknown). The phylogenetic positions for the At-α and At-β WGDs are depicted with white diamond symbols, and significant net diversification rate shifts with red star symbols.
I'm referring to the paper published in PNAS in June 2015, entitled The butterfly plant arms-race escalated by gene and genome duplications, now freely available under PNAS' open access option, the work of a large international team of scientists including biologists from The University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA, The Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany, and the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, UK.
This work confirmed the conclusions made 50 years earlier by two now-renowned biologists, Peter Raven and Paul Erhlich, who introduced the concept of co-evolution, where two species influence the evolution of each other, by showing how gene duplication, and subsequent repurposing of the spare genes produced, was responsible for plants evolving a defence against the caterpillars of butterflies and how, beginning about the same time as the extinction of the large dinosaurs in the mass extinction at the KT boundary, this gave rise over several million years to the co-evolutionary diversification of brassica-eating butterfly species and the brassicas, in an ultimately pointless arms race. Raven and Erhlich had even used the brassicales and cabbage butterflies as examples (A case of a prediction of the Theory of Evolution being proved correct, 50 years later!) .
The result of this arms race was the tangy taste we call mustard, produced by glucosinolates - chemicals which are toxic to butterfly caterpillars and other leaf-eating insects - the large number of brassicales and a large number of brassica-eating butterflies.
The blunder by Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer, if you believe that nonsense, is that it apparently thought it was good design to create species to eat the leaves of plants, then redesign the plants to prevent them being eaten, then redesign the plant-eating insects to overcome the toxins intended to stop them eating the plants. An example there of the designer's right hand not knowing what its left hand was doing!
A research paper dealing with the evolution of a widespread species of African monkey, the Mona Monkey, Cercopithecus mona, illustrates several mechanisms by which a species can diversify and speciate, and gives the lie to the Creationist claim that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis.
The reality is that the TOE is the foundation of modern biology and the only theory that explains the observed facts. Creationist frauds like to tell their dupes that it's about to be overthrown by some flavour of Bible-literalist fundamentalist creationism or other to make them feel intellectually superior to 'mad' scientists with their 'false' theories and wacky ideas.
Lateral detail of a living Trioceros wolfgangboehmeisp. nov. from Goba, Ethiopia, showing the heterogeneous body scalation with both small scattered tubercles and enlarged flattened plate-like scales. In this individual the dorsolateral stripe is interrupted and forms a Y-shaped pattern on the flanks.
Photo by Petr Nečas.
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Living juvenile of Trioceros wolfgangboehmeisp. nov. from Goba, Ethiopia.
Photo by Petr Nečas.
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Digital elevation map of Ethiopia (generated by using the geographic information system ArcGIS 10.0; elevation in m a.s.l) indicating the currently known distribution of Trioceros wolfgangboehmeisp. nov. east of the Ethiopian Rift in the northern Bale Mountains (red stars; left star: Dinsho, right star: Goba). Black star: Addis Abeba. Grey dots show records of T. affinis based on distributional data after Largen and Spawls (2010) and Ceccarelli et al. (2014).
Here is another example of why fragile and vulnerable habitats need to be
preserved, if only for the rich variety of new species that could be living
there.
This time it is a new species of chameleon from the Bale Mountain forests of
Ethiopia. This one was discovered by zoologists Thore Koppetsch and Benjamin
Wipfler of the Research Museum Alexander Koenig in Bonn, Germany, and Petr Nečas
from the Czech Republic. The new species, Trioceros wolfgangboehmei is a
new small-sized chameleon living on the edge of the forest. Their findings were
published in the open-access, peer-reviewed life science journal
Zoosystematics and Evolution.
