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Evolution is twice as fast in the tropics mongabay.com May 1, 2006 Tropical species evolve twice as fast as temperate species according to research published in Tuesday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "This is very exciting research into evolutionary trends and the implied polarity across the latitudes is of great interest," said lead author Shane Wright, a plant geneticist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "The research may explain why the tropics contain such a great richness of species, and further research is required to understand what is driving the difference - smaller population sizes or warmer temperatures and higher metabolic rates." Warmer temperatures could speed evolution by increasing rates at which chemical reactions -- including metabolism and DNA replication -- occur resulting in genetic mutations that, through the process of natural selection, can result in new species.
Biodiversity is several magnitudes higher in the tropics than in temperate regions. For example, whereas temperate forests are often dominated by a half dozen tree species or fewer that make up 90 percent of the trees in the forest, a tropical rainforest may have more than 480 tree species in a single hectare (2.5 acres). A single bush in the Amazon may have more species of ants than the entire British Isles. Of the world's twenty most biodiverse countries, 15 -- Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, India, Peru, Bolivia, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Madagascar -- feature predominantly tropical ecosystems. In recent years, deforestation of tropical rainforests and damage to coral reefs have spawned concerns among of biologists of an extinction crisis. Earlier this year, the U.N.'s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned that extinctions are presently running at 100 to 1,000 times the background rate.
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