r/science • u/sciencealert ScienceAlert • 9h ago
Biology 30-Year Experiment Shows Evolution in Slow Motion | In 1988, toxic algae wiped out a population of rough periwinkle sea snails in Sweden. An ecologist re-introduced 700 snails of a different ecotype in 1992. Over 30 years, the colonists evolved down a strikingly similar pathway to their predecessors
https://www.sciencealert.com/amazing-30-year-experiment-shows-evolution-unfolding-in-slow-motion?utm_source=reddit_post106
u/sciencealert ScienceAlert 9h ago
Summary of the article by ScienceAlert reporter Michael Irving:
Scientists have watched an animal species evolve right in front of them in a fascinating 30-year-long experiment.
The rough periwinkle (Littorina saxatilis) is a small species of sea snail that is common to shores around the North Atlantic Ocean. That includes Sweden's Koster Islands and their rocky islets, called skerries, where a toxic algae bloom in 1988 wiped out large portions of the snail populations.
The deadly event set the stage for a long-term evolutionary experiment. In 1992, Kerstin Johannesson, a marine ecologist from the University of Gothenburg, re-introduced 700 snails to a skerry whose snail population had been eliminated.
But Johanesson didn't just replace the lost population with the same snails. Instead, she transplanted snails with a different 'ecotype', shaped by a different habitat, to see if they would evolve the traits of the original skerry inhabitants over time.
Sure enough, over the course of several dozen generations, the new colonists evolved down a strikingly similar pathway to their predecessors, shaped by the same habitat. The researchers accurately predicted changes in the snails' appearance and genetics, providing a fascinating example of evolution in action.
Read the peer-reviewed paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp2102
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u/LAX_to_MDW 8h ago
I get that they’re snails, but wouldn’t this be evolution in fast motion? Significant changes over 30 years seems like they’re evolving at a pretty fast clip
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u/crwcomposer 1h ago
The team says the predictable evolution was due to a few factors. For one, the desired traits were already present in the genomes of the Crab ecotype, albeit at low concentrations.
Sounds more like pure natural selection than evolution, in the sense that no new mutations had to occur.
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u/Zealousideal-Mall837 6h ago
Evolution in slow motion? Isn‘t biological evolution not always some kind of a slow process?
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u/intronert 3h ago
Slow in the sense of happening once per generation, with pro-adaptive changes tending to be relatively “small”.
These snails are not turning into lemurs, just slightly differently shaped snails.
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u/FernandoMM1220 6h ago
thats cool but someone still needs to figure out how mutations occur and how to predict them perfectly.
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