Thermal adaptation and ecological speciation

Thermal adaptation and ecological speciation.

Ecological speciation is defined as the emergence of reproductive isolation as a direct or indirect consequence of divergent ecological adaptation. Several empirical examples of ecological speciation have been reported in the literature which very often involve adaptation to biotic resources. In this review, we investigate whether adaptation to different thermal habitats could also promote spec...

Coevolution, local adaptation and ecological speciation.

Coevolution is one of the major processes organizing the earth's biodiversity, but it remains unclear when and how it may generate species diversity. The study by Parchman et al. () in this issue of Molecular Ecology provides the clearest evidence to date that divergent local adaptation in a coevolving interaction may lead to speciation on one side of an interaction but not necessarily on the o...

Adaptive Radiation: The Interaction of Ecological Opportunity, Adaptation, and Speciation

Ecological adaptation in bacteria: speciation driven by codon selection.

In bacteria, physiological change may be effected by a single gene acquisition, producing ecological differentiation without genetic isolation. Natural selection acting on such differences can reduce the frequency of genotypes that arise from recombination at these loci. However, gene acquisition can only account for recombination interference in the fraction of the genome that is tightly linke...

Genetics and ecological speciation.

Species originate frequently by natural selection. A general mechanism by which this occurs is ecological speciation, defined as the evolution of reproductive isolation between populations as a result of ecologically-based divergent natural selection. The alternative mechanism is mutation-order speciation in which populations fix different mutations as they adapt to similar selection pressures....