Fish that made a leap in evolution

That was the name of an article in the Toronto Star's science section yesterday.

First few lines:

" Biologists have found that salmon in a lake in the northwest U.S. developed into two genetically different populations in only 13 generations - much faster than expected. In effect, it was evidence of a small but rapid step in salmon evolution."

Comments? Questions?

P.S. I do not mean to start another long argument with this. Please do all the arguing inside your own head and not with other people, thank you; I'm sure everyone's tired enough from the last one.

I haven't read the article, but i guess it's probably based on a scientific article published in a scientific journal; those kind of scientific articles are made to be presented to the scientific community to be scrutinized, not to be presented as final proof in any sense... but popular journalistic articles made from them usually don't point out that distinction to the public, unfortunately...

One must wait and see what would be further investigations by other biologists anylysing the data, or other studies; and especially also wait for further interpretations...

Key word here is: "wait".
In the sense of: "let's be patient, and wait for confirmations and/or rebuttals"...

Actually, it struck me as one of those articles that had been watered down to the basics and leave all the details out because there are too many details to cover.

More from the "article":

The Salmon's history

- 1937: Sockeye salmon were introduced into Lake Washington east of Seattle
- Late 1930s: Salmon began nesting and breeding in the riverbed of Cedar River
- 1957: Salmon had migrated into lake and some were settling along beaches.
- 1992: Researchers began studying the salmon.

What researchers found

1: Within a few generations, natural changes in the salmon's DNA had produced two genetically different populations with different body shapes - the beach and river salmon.

2: The salmon were free to swim between the river and beach environments, but each group had a special reproductive advantage in one environment:
- The sleek males and strong female salmon flourished in the river.
- The big, female-attracting beach males were a success in the calm beach waters.

3: The two populations tended not to interbreed and became "reproductively isolated", with their physical differences reinforcing their genetic differences. That pushed the groups in different evolutionary directions. Over a long period of time, this process might produce two extremely different types of fish.

hmmm... would have to read original article... did the Toronto paper say where the original was published? Nature?


I would like to know if interbreeding produced non-viable fertilized eggs, or simply nothing (non-fertilizable eggs).