Fish Evolution on Short Timescale (VIDEO)
Caption
William A. Cresko, a biologist at the University of Oregon, discusses his lab's discovery that the tiny threespine stickleback, native to seawater, tapped evolutionary components of their genome to quickly evolve, both genetically and phenotypically, to survive the 1964 Alaska earthquake. Many stickleback had been isolated from seawater, left stranded in freshwater ponds, by geologic uplift. The study, published in PNAS, is the first to document such fast evolution involving both genetic and external traits.
Credit
Video by Charlie Litchfield
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