Question

Respond to the following in a minimum of 300 words:

Is radiation of species static or ongoing? Explain.

Answer 1

Static

Asymptotic diversification patterns and adaptive radiations implicitly suggests that the environments occupied by radiating clades are static over their evolutionary histories. This is because ecological opportunity gets saturated early on, then, adaptive diversification slows down.

When a species faces a new environment with lot of available resources that is called 'ecological opportunity'. This single species then makes the most of these resources and multiplies rapidly into several adaptive forms. Then after the resources are used up, the process of biodiversity proliferation slows down drastically.

The slowdown of adaptive radiance in the production of evolutionary novelty after the Cambrian explosion inspite of increased taxonomic diversity at lower ranks may and the absence of Cambrian-like diversification may be led to mass extinctions.

In other words, diversification slowdowns when a threshold is crossed, leading to a static state.