The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, and Biogeography

ISBN-13: 9780195141702 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 548 str.

Ernst Mayr; Jared Diamond

Opis

Speciation is the process by which co-existing daughter species evolve from one ancestral species - e.g., humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas arising from a common ancestor around 5,000,000 years ago. However, many questions about speciation remain controversial. The Birds of Northern Melanesia provides by far the most comprehensive study yet available of a rich fauna, composed of the 195 breeding land and fresh-water bird species of the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes east of New Guinea. This avifauna offers decisive advantages for understanding speciation, and includes famous examples of geographic variation discussed in textbooks of evolutionary biology.
The book results from 30 years of collaboration between the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and the ecologist Jared Diamond. It shows how Northern Melanesian bird distributions provide snapshots of all stages in speciation, from the earliest (widely distributed species without geographic variation) to the last (closely related, reproductively isolated species occurring sympatrically and segregating ecologically). The presentation emphasizes the wide diversity of speciation outcomes, steering a middle course between one-model-fits-all simplification and ungeneralizable species accounts. Questions illuminated include why some species are much more prone to speciate than others, why some water barriers are much more effective at promoting speciation than others, and whether hypothesized taxon cycles, faunal dominance, and legacies of Pleistocene land bridges are real.
These years of study have resulted in a huge database, complete with distributions of all 195 species on 76 islands, together with their taxonomy, colonization routes, ecological attributes, abundance, and overwater dispersal. Color plates depict 88 species and allospecies, many of which have never been seen before. For students of speciation, Northern Melanesian birds now constitute a model system against which other biotas can be compared. For population biologists interested in other problems besides speciation, this rich database can now be mined for insights.

Recenzje

Abundance of illustrations ... superb series of nine plates by Douglas Pratt that, for the first time, depict many of the forms in colour ... This definitive volume will inspire a new set of studies based on genetics and DNA, before too many of the unique island forms disappear. It will remain the ultimate work on island speciation. The Quarterly Review of Biology

O autorze

Jared Diamond, geb. 1938 in Boston, ist Professor für Geographie an der Universität von Kalifornien in Los Angeles. Für seine Arbeit auf dem Feld der Anthropologie und Genetik ist Jared Diamond vielfach ausgezeichnet worden. Ernst Mayr - Ornithologe, Zoologe und Taxonom - geboren 1904 in Kempten, gilt als einer der vorrangigen Begründer der modernen Synthese aus Genetik und Evolutionstheorie. Der "Darwin des 20. Jahrhunderts" (New York Times) war bis zur Emeritierung Professor des Museum of Comparative Zoology an der Harvard-Universität. Karriere-Beginn in den 20er Jahren mit der Erforschung der Vogelwelt auf den Pazifik-Inseln, Berufung zum Kurator der berühmten Whitney-Rothschild Collection am American Museum of Natural History. Veröffentlichung zahlreicher Fachpublikationen. Der Autor verstarb im Februar 2005.