Question

How might adaptive radiation look in an asexual clone population? What evolutionary forces would or would not be at play?

Answer 1

When population numbers are more and new resources in different habitats are available, organisms can quickly adapt to new habitats and evolve to reduce competition nad survive. Finches are one such example which have radiated in to different islands and adapted to feed on the available food in the island. Fiches are sexually reproducing organisms.

Asexual reproduction is common in plants and also in some less evolved organisms such as sponges, cnidarians and in microbes.

Organism may be reproducing sexually or asexually, selective pressure will always operate on the organisms when they try to inhabit a new habitat for more resources. Selective pressure will decide which organism or variant will survive and which variant does not survive.

But an organism that is asexually reproducing , will not have variations as much as a sexually reproducing organism has. An organism reproducing sexually will have more variations because fo recombination which occurs during meiosis and also two parents are involved in reproduction.

But in an asexually reproducing organism , there is no meiosis occuring and only one parent is involved. So all the organisms produced are like clone which means they are exactly similar to one another. So, when they inhabit different habitats there are no variations for the natural selection to operate and select a best suited organism. So adaptive radiation will not be as successful in asexually reproducing organism as in sexually reproducing organism.

Asexually reproducing organism has to develop variations through mutations which may not be as frequent and suitable mutations might help the organism to inhabit new areas for adaptive radiation to occur.