Ecological Opportunity and Adaptive Radiation

The process of adaptive radiation—the proliferation of species from a single ancestor and diversification into many ecologically different forms—has been of great interest to evolutionary biologists since Darwin. Since the middle of the last century, ecological opportunity has been invoked as a potential key to understanding when and how adaptive radiation occurs. Interest in the topic of ecological opportunity has accelerated as research on adaptive radiation has experienced a resurgence, fueled in part by advances in phylogenetic approaches to studying evolutionary diversification. Nonetheless, what the term actually means, much less how it mechanistically leads to adaptive diversification, is currently…

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  Florida International University