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Fish take less than a decade to evolve Jeremy Hance mongabay.com June 22, 2009
Less than a decade ago Swanne Gordon, a graduate student at UC Riverside, and her team introduced Trinidadian guppies into the Damier River in the Caribbean island of Trinidad. They placed the guppies above a waterfall to allow them to flourish in a largely predator-free environment. In eight years the guppies had undergone noticeable evolution: they produced larger and fewer offspring.
To test just how well-adapted to their environment the guppies in the test site had become, Gordon and her team introduced a new population of guppies, who lived under heavy predation, into the site. The team studied the competing populations for four weeks, and found that the locally adapted guppies fared far better, especially the juveniles. Local juvenile survival was over 50 percent higher than the introduced juveniles from the predated population. "This shows that adaptive change can improve survival rates after fewer than ten years in a new environment," Gordon said. "It shows, too, that evolution might sometimes influence population dynamics in the face of environmental change." Related articles Fastest evolving bird family produces new species (03/16/2009) Discovered in the Solomon Island of Vanikoro, a new species of bird from the white-eye family leads credence to the belief that white-eyes are the world's fastest evolving family of birds. Newly discovered pink iguana sheds light on Galapagos evolution 
(01/06/2009) A newly identified, but already endangered species of pink land iguana may provide evidence of the lizard's evolution on the Galápagos Islands, report researchers writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Global warming may provoke evolution (11/26/2007) Some 80 million years ago, during a period of global warming, a group of relatively immobile salamanders trekked from western North America to the continent that became Asia, report researchers writing in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. SHARE THIS ARTICLE:
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