A local inexperienced iguana on Fiji. For years, biologists puzzled over how these iguanas had ended up within the South Pacific, so removed from different iguana species. A brand new research sheds gentle on their evolution.
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A local inexperienced iguana on Fiji. For years, biologists puzzled over how these iguanas had ended up within the South Pacific, so removed from different iguana species. A brand new research sheds gentle on their evolution.
tobiasjo/Getty Photographs
The place did the Fijian iguanas come from … and the way?
For many years, it has been a scientific thriller.
Most iguanas are indigenous to the Americas; nonetheless, native Fijian iguanas, name an island almost 5000 miles away from their closest kinfolk within the South Pacific house.
Because of genome mapping, researchers suppose they’ve came upon how: The iguanas rafted.
Biologists used phylogenomic information to primarily construct an iguana household tree — seeing which species had been most carefully associated to at least one one other.
“The iguanas that reside on Fiji had been most carefully associated to a gaggle of iguanas that I knew very nicely from the USA referred to as desert iguanas,” says Simon Scarpetta, an evolutionary biologist on the College of San Francisco who led the research.
This rafting idea is not fully unprecedented.
Within the Nineties, after hurricanes Luis and Marilyn hit the Caribbean, researchers discovered {that a} group of iguanas had floated over 180 miles away from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe to the territory of Anguilla — all on a clump of downed bushes.
Reaching Fiji would have been almost 30 instances as far — a months-long journey of hundreds of miles. However, the scientists who research these creatures say that if any creature might survive, it is iguanas.
Wish to hear extra about iguanas? Or rafts? Or evolutionary biology? E mail us at shortwave@npr.org.
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This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Jon Lambert and Tyler Jones checked the details. The audio engineer was Zo vanGinhoven.
