Read more: “Unnatural selection: How humans are driving evolution“
In 1935, the South American cane toad was introduced to Australia to control pests feeding on sugar cane. The cane fields were not to the toad’s liking, but the rest of the countryside was. The toad has spread rapidly at the expense of many native species.
The highly poisonous animals are having a big effect on predators. Some, such as the , are developing resistance to cane toad toxins. Others, such as the red-bellied black snake and green tree snake, are changing in a more surprising way – . The reason is simple: snakes with big mouths can eat large toads that contain enough toxin to kill them.
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The toads themselves are also changing. Some are that were too hot for the founder population, suggesting that they are evolving tolerance to more extreme conditions. What’s more, the toads leading the invasion are becoming better colonisers: they have bigger front legs and stronger back legs than toads living in the areas already colonised. Radio tagging has confirmed that these “super-invader” toads can travel faster, as you might expect. They are probably evolving because the first toads to reach new areas benefit from more food and less competition, and thus have more offspring. The changes are likely to be transient, though – once the toads stop spreading, the “super-invader” traits will gradually be lost.
Ships and planes have turned the natural trickle of species spreading to new islands or continents into a raging torrent, and the new arrivals sometimes have a dramatic effect. In areas of the US that have been invaded by fire ants, for instance, native fence lizards have evolved longer legs. They need them: given the opportunity, a dozen fire ants can kill a lizard in minutes.
Rather than simply study the results of invasions, Michael Kinnison of the University of Maine in Orono and colleagues have been actively experimenting. In one experiment, his team moved juvenile chinook salmon from one river in New Zealand to another. The salmon were introduced to the country around a century ago, and Kinnison wanted to assess the extent to which they had adapted to conditions in individual rivers. He found drastic differences in survival, even though the fish appear identical (). “When a population was locally adapted, it performed twice as well,” he says.
Kinnison suspects that lots of small changes can add up to make a huge difference to a population’s success. “Contemporary evolution may be relatively modest on a trait-by-trait basis, but its overall contribution to the performance of populations may be immense,” he says.
Such findings help explain why there is often a lag between the introduction of new species and their rapid spread. A newly arrived species is likely to find itself in an environment that is not quite ideal, and its population may be very small, meaning there is little genetic diversity. In these circumstances, a species will spread only slowly, if at all.
As the population begins to adapt to local conditions, though – perhaps via invisible changes such as mutations in immune genes – it is likely to start to grow and spread. Because more mutations occur in larger populations, it will then evolve faster, enabling it to spread quicker and further. If this turns out to be common, it is bad news. It suggests that many introduced species that seem to be behaving themselves could yet start spreading explosively and cause serious problems.
Read next article: “Unnatural selection: Fish growing up fast“
