How you evolve depends on what you see!!!
Ole Seehausen’s group from the University of Bern in Switzerland, studied cichlid fish in Lake Victoria in east Africa (home for over 500 species of cichlid’s )believes that vision could be the driving force for speciation.Evolutionary science belief that new species are born when populations become isolated from one another and hence forcing them to adapt differently. This excellent work by scientists from Swiss provides great evidence that vision can give rise to new species.
Lake Victoria, where water clarity and light vary considerably is home to many Fish species of variable colors. If one take a look at shallow parts where blue light is prominent and the waters are populated by blue males of the species Pundamilia pundamilia. As the water gets deepens and red light becomes increasingly dominant, one can see greater numbers of red-coloured males of the species Pundamilia nyererei .
Previous work done in this field has shown that variants in one of the genes responsible for tuning the fish’s vision to different colours and in this new study they found that some of the variants are more sensitive towards one particular light- fishes which are more sensitive to red light lived deeper in the lake and others prone to blue lived in shallow water.
“We found a strong association between the visual gene and fish colour,” “Red fish have the gene that shifts vision towards picking up red light, and the blue fish have visual genes that pick up blue light.”–Seehausen
This group also provided elegant proof that vision plays part in female fishes when it comes to selecting of males.Females with blue-biased vision prefer to mate with blue males, and red-biased females mate with red males ,which shows that vision plays a pivotal role in selecting partner and hence in the birth of new species.
Reference:
Speciation through sensory drive in cichlid fish.
Ole Seehausen, Yohey Terai, Isabel S. Magalhaes, Karen L. Carleton, Hillary D. J. Mrosso, Ryutaro Miyagi, Inke van der Sluijs, Maria V. Schneider, Martine E. Maan, Hidenori Tachida, Hiroo Imai & Norihiro Okada
doi:10.1038/nature07285
Image Credit : Erica Marshall / Flickr
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