"The size at which North Atlantic cod are maturing now is about 50 per cent of the size at which

they were maturing after World War II, and there has been a question mark over whether that is down to evolution," he said. "We have shown that evolution of that kind of magnitude does happen in around that number of generations." "The consequences are twofold. First, if you stop harvesting, theyre not going to go back to how they were before. Then, if they have evolved in a certain direction, they might evolve themselves into an extinction scenario, a situation where theyre not economically important anymore, or where theyre sufficiently small to be eaten by other predators and so the population crashes." While there are researchers conducting similar experiments with small populations of fish in tanks, a further four or five other examples which reinforce the results of this study would go a long way towards confirming the robustness of the findings made by Professor Benton and his colleagues. In a fast-changing world, many issues that we need to deal with as humans are relevant to ecology, whether its the number of fish we take from the sea, the way we cope with pests and diseases, or our dealings with ecosystem services that we rely on, such as pollinators. "We need to think about how we manage ecology in the face of a changing world," Professor Benton stressed. "And its not just about ecology, because as the world is changing, species are also evolving much more rapidly than we wouldve thought possible 10 or 15 years ago." In terms of managing biodiversity in nature reserves, for example, Professor Benton asserted that natural selection can often be based on dispersal behaviour. Nature reserves could be established now at a distance of 20 miles apart because that is the distance over which a species disperses at the moment. In 100 years, however, they might only disperse 10 miles, in which case there would be no habitat to go to and the species would be driven to extinction. "The question of evolution is really important for population management in anything more than a five year window, and all attempts at population management have to cope with those longer term windows," he remarked. As Professor Benton pointed out, many topical issues at the moment are directly relevant to the evolution of the tiny soil mites in their glass tubes. Antibiotic resistance is an evolutionary question; so is the rise of bird flu in South-east Asia, and the advance of various pests and diseases alongside climate change. "The speed at which the environment is changing and how it might, through evolution, impact upon us and challenge us will raise many, many questions that we will need to answer in due course."

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