The origin of island biota: Several things in one

Abstract

Abstract. Islands can be continental or oceanic. The latter ones, well known as test tubes or natural laboratories, are only colonized by dispersal and their biota are new assemblages of species with subsequent and potentially interesting evolutionary events. Their study however requires considering sophisticated hypotheses of colonization, keeping geological knowledge independent and sampling widely the island regional context.Islands have always been fascinating to people and even the most "terrestrial" persons repeatedly heard about them. Scientists coming to study them were already fed since their childhood with some famous and spirited literature describing islands as refuges for sailors and tramps, territories for social utopia or hidden places for treasures and fights (Stevenson, Defoe, Nordhoff & Hall, Wells, Huxley, Merle, etc.) This social background strongly shaped our way of thinking island biological evolution. Scientists then see islands as remarkable microcosmos and most theories depicting their evolution treat them as systems isolated from other biota with specific processes involving refuges, novel interactions, extinctions or relicts. These recurrent topics or views produced since more than one century and a half of dedicated scientific literature would gain to be disentangled and critically re-analyzed. We must rediscover how many different kinds of islands exist, we must test common and unquestioned postulates about the evolution of their biota, and finally drawn the main critical issues which are in need of study with an appropriate sampling strategy. We could also ask finally whether islands significantly differ from continental biota or are they just workable simple systems? To answer these questions, we have chosen to focus on a few issues that seem to us more important to consider and more amenable to scientific tests.

The quest for the origins in evolutionary biology

“…This is also why the subject of synthetic Life is so striking as if it is an impossible or inacceptable performance for us to produce Life by ourselves [8,9]. The same trend also appears to explain the origin of other appealing and exceptional features, though less unique, such as the origin of metazoans in hydrothermal vents, mimetic butterflies, or the island organisms [10][11][12]. These features have often been considered in a far too much focused context and the study of their origin is much improved in a wider context, wider than the vents, the mimetic systems and the islands, respectively.…”

“…Most often, they are built in adaptational explanations, using several candidate factors [11,23]. But these potential causality factors can be numerous and interrelated, making the statistical analysis difficult.…”