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Adaptive Radiation
Adaptive radiation occurs most often in new environment with a variety of
different unfilled niches so that plants and animals that are not adapted to
those areas can exploit the resources in the respective niches. Once
individuals begin exploiting the new niches, mutations that will benefit the
species will spread throughout the population via natural selection giving the
owners an overwhelming advantage over others without the mutation and
throughout evolutionary time a new species is established.
If sexual selection is linked to these mutations a new species can be
established even faster.
For example if a few individuals of a seed eating bird were to start eating
fruit due to a surplus of fruit in the environment a few mutations would
appear to make them better fruit eaters, which also happen to coincide with
a change in the birds aesthetics or song, then the fruit eating birds may
decide to mate amongst each other rather than seed eaters. Furthermore
even if seed and fruit eaters were to interbreed, the result could be a bird
that is neither a dominant seed nor fruit eater and lose out to purebred seed
and bird eaters. The hybrids would be eliminated by natural selection due to
decreased output capacity. Natural selection will then result in more district
plumage or songs of fruit eaters allowing them to be identified with other
fruit eaters avoiding mating with seed eaters.
Other individuals of the same seed eating ancestral species may find nectar
as a viable source of food and evolve over time via natural selection into a
new species.

Adaptive radiation is when a single species evolves into a number of distinct

yet closely related species.
Each new species is adapted to live in a different ecological niche. This
process usually occurs when a variety of new resources are made available
and are not used by any other species.
An example would be Dwarvens finches. There are 13 different species that
live in the Galapagos Islands all evolved from a common ancestor. Assuming
that all the finches all had medium sized beaks that fed on medium sized
seeds; individual with smaller beaks would have an easier time eating
smaller seeds however there could be other birds that have already adapted
for consumption of smaller seeds. This is the same for the birds with larger
beaks. Other birds from a different species may already be programmed to
consume seeds and thus competition is introduced.

Adaptive radiation is when a species is introduced into a new environment

when competitors or predators are eliminated by a catastrophe and thus the
species becomes isolated from competition. This can happen via mass
extinction, continental drift or induction. Some examples of species that
developed from are lemurs from primitive primates on the island of
Madagascar, and a diverse range of primitive mammals that evolved into
terrestrial, avian and aquatic forms during the tertiary period,
Bailey, Jill. "adaptive radiation." Science Online. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 18
Dec. 2012. <http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?
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adaptive radiation
From: Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.
Adaptive radiation has nothing to do with unstable isotopes. Its a form of
evolution in which many different species have a single common ancestor.
Throughout the history of the world, species have become extinct by natural
selection or simple misfortune while others produced many new species as a
result of adaptive radiation.
Adaptive radiation can occur when a species is relocated to a new location
which the founding population undergoes adaptive radiation or the surviving
remnants of a population of a once widespread species undergoes adaptive
radiation.
The result is increase in biodiversity over evolutionary time as the ancestral
population separate into distinct populations that do not interbreed thus
allowing different directions of evolution to occur. This is usually a result of
environmental factors such as natural selection. For example some finches
may be in an environment thats rich with insects and evolve pointed beaks
via natural selection in order for better consumption of the resources while
other finches in an environment with a lot of large seeds may evolve larger
beaks via natural selection and so forth.
Nearly every genus contains more than one species or any family with more
than a single genus can be an example. White oaks are part of the genus and

subgenus of querus. At a time of about 80 million years ago there may have
lived a single species of white oak that lived in what now is East Asia.
In the Mesozoic and Cenozoic era warm temperatures on Earth allowed oaks
to spread to the northern hemisphere which present day locations are
Europe, Eastern North America and California. Then Eurasia was separated
from North America via continental drift and cooler. The Rocky Mountains
arose and conditions became cooler and drier during the latter part of the
Cenozoic era. These events separate the white oaks of Europe, eastern North
America and California separating them into three different species including
querus robur (English oak), in Europe Querus macrocarpa (bur oak) in
eastern North America and Querbus douglasii (Blue oak) in California.
Deciduous patterns of leaf productions were encouraged in cold areas while
warmer areas encouraged evergreen patterns. Oak species constitute as an
example of adaptive radiation within the white oak subgenus.
While adaptive radiation of oaks occurred over the course of 80 million years,
the time of adaptive radiation of 500 species of cichlid fish in the lakes of
Malawi, Tanganyika and Victoria in Africa has occurred in just the last few
thousand years. Fish with heavy jaws to crush mollusks; slender, swift fish
that consume plankton, small fish that prey on parasites off the skins of
larger cichlid fish, larger fish that devour other fishes and fish with sharp
teeth that scrape algae off rocks have one similar component. They have
little genetic variation and thus their adaptive radiation was rapid and
recent.
The Hawaiian archipelago sits on a plume of lava that rises from the mantle
known as a hot spot. The oldest islands have now completely eroded
beneath sea level while major islands such as Niihau and Kauai which formed
5 million years ago no longer have active volcanoes. The youngest island
Hawaii is less than a million years old and still has active volcanic eruptions.
Plant and animal species have dispersed to the islands primary from the
south west evolving into unique Hawaiian archipelago. Species from older
islands disperse into younger ones as they become suitable for life and
radiation occurs in space (unique species of each island) and time (From
older islands to younger ones) in the Hawaiian archipelago.
The presence of other species can prelude directions of speciation. For
example on the Galapagos Islands, predators were largely absent and
finches figured a way to drink blood from the legs of large marine birds by
pecking them. Woodpeckers were also absent and some finches who use
sticks to get insects out of holes would not have been able to compete with
the efficient predators and predators.
Therefore adaptive radiation occurs rapidly when a new population invades a
new habitat with a different variety of resources. The population adapts to
the conditions of the new habitat with no potential predators.
Release from competition is the main reason why adaptive radiation has
occurred after large disasters. Example: in the Mesozoic era Mammals

constant body temperature worked to their advantage as nocturnal animals

while dinosaurs ruled the daytime. With the Cretaceous extinction, dinosaurs
were cleared away leaving mammals to evolved to a large size which would
have been unsuccessful should they had to compete with large dinosaurs.
Mammals such as whales, bats, and primates evolved. Mammals continued
adaptive radiation but none was as spectacular as in the early Cenozoic era.
The preservation of biodiversity requires protection of not just species but
subspecies and variety as well in order to increase the gene pool.
Further Information
Gillespie, Rosemary G. "The ecology and evolution of Hawaiian spider
communities." American Scientist 93 (2005): 122131.
Grant, Peter R., and B. Rosemary Grant. How and Why Species Multiply: The
Radiation of Darwin's Finches. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2007.
Schilthuizen, Menno. Frogs, Flies, and Dandelions: The Making of Species.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Schluter, Dolph. The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000.
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APA

Citation Information
Rice, Stanley A. "adaptive radiation." Science Online. Facts On File, Inc. Web.
18 Dec. 2012. <http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?
ItemID=WE40&SID=5&iPin=ENBIOD0003&SingleRecord=True>.
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- Adaptive radiation will usually occur when a species is able to exploit a
wide variety of new resources with little or no competition from other species

Adaptive radiation most often occurs when there is a new environment and
there is no established species in that environment. Basically there are a lot
of unfilled niches, so animals and plants that are not adapted to those niches
can, in the absence of competition, exploit those niches. Once a few
individuals of a species begin exploiting the new niches, any mutation that
will result in an improvement in exploiting these niches willl give its owner a
big advantage over others, and such a mutation will spread quickly through a
population. A series of these mutations can fixate quickly over time. If sexual
selection is linked to these mutations, a new species can quickly be
established. For example, if a few individuals of a seed-eating bird were to
start eating fruits and a few mutations were to appear in these individuals
that would make them better fruit eaters, and these mutations coincide with
a change in the birds plumage or song, then these fruit eating birds may
choose only to mate with each other rather than with seed-eating birds.
Further, even if the seed and fruit eaters were to interbreed, the result could
be a bird that is neither a good seed eater nor a good fruit eater and lose out
to the purebred fruit and seed eaters. The hybrids would then be negatively
selected and may well be eliminated by natural selection because of
decreased fitness. Such natural selection will then result in the fruit eaters
evolving more distinctive plumage or songs so that the fruit eaters can
identify other fruit eaters and to avoid mating with the seed eaters.
Other individuals of the same seed-eating bird species may find that it can
eat nectar instead of seeds or fruits and the nectar eaters can in time
become a different species for the same reasons that the fruit eaters did.
What I have described is of course similar to what happened on the
Galapagos Islands and its finches.
Other examples of adaptive radiation are the well known cases of the Tertiary
radiation of mammals and birds. After the enantiornithine birds, plesiosaurs,
pterosaurs and dinosaurs were wiped out by the giant meteor 65 million
years ago, all sorts of different mammals and birds evolved from the
survivers. There were a lot of empty niches left by the enantiornithine birds
and dinosaurs. Many birds, for example, became huge and predatory, taking
the niche occupied previously by the theropod dinosaurs. The mammals, too,
evolved into predators (such as the mesonychids), bats, whales and giant
herbivores, after the dinosaurs, pterosaurs and plesiosaurs (giant aquatic
reptiles) were gone, even though the mammals of the dinosaur era were
small, nocturnal insect eaters. Most of the birds that survived the K-T
extinction were shore-birds, and yet a large number of avian orders evolved

from them. The parrots, ducks, hawks, owls, swifts, hummingbirds, ostriches,
quails, storks, and others evolved from these shorebirds in order to exploit
different niches that are available.
The African great lakes are also examples of adaptive radiation. When these
lakes form, a single species of cichlid fish that finds itself stranded in the lake
may evolve into a large number of different species in a short period of time,
because there is an abundance of new niches and no established species to
exploit them.