- Location
- Bay Ridge, BK
BBC News Article: Coral Reefs are evolution hotspot
- Thread starter James
- Start date
- Location
- Southampton UK
They Do indeed DrGonzo.
Its widely accepted these days that many corals change their structure and makeup to adapt to captive conditions including the vast differences in chemistry they encounter in captivity....so much so that long term captive SPS species are virtually unidentifiable at a structural skeletal level from their wild counterparts that were imported originally. Whether these changes are as a consequence, or an adaptation on the corals part is the thing thats open to debate.
although in its true sense this isn't so much evolution at a DNA level to distinguish a new species as such, it is very much 'one' of the stages of evolution, where a given species adapts or changes to differing conditions from its counterparts enabling it to spread or take up new regions or habitats...from there its just a short skip and a jump (tied with a bit of exclusion from the source gene pool) before you do see changes and end up with a new species)...Darwin and the Galapagos finch's a case in point) Our tanks (if maintained long term) are very much mirror images of this kind of evolution, albeit just a microscopic slice of the full transition..
regards
Its widely accepted these days that many corals change their structure and makeup to adapt to captive conditions including the vast differences in chemistry they encounter in captivity....so much so that long term captive SPS species are virtually unidentifiable at a structural skeletal level from their wild counterparts that were imported originally. Whether these changes are as a consequence, or an adaptation on the corals part is the thing thats open to debate.
although in its true sense this isn't so much evolution at a DNA level to distinguish a new species as such, it is very much 'one' of the stages of evolution, where a given species adapts or changes to differing conditions from its counterparts enabling it to spread or take up new regions or habitats...from there its just a short skip and a jump (tied with a bit of exclusion from the source gene pool) before you do see changes and end up with a new species)...Darwin and the Galapagos finch's a case in point) Our tanks (if maintained long term) are very much mirror images of this kind of evolution, albeit just a microscopic slice of the full transition..
regards
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