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| Looking east from near the top of Mount Lemmon, January 2021 |
1. The Galapagos Islands, with their famous finches and their less-famous tomatoes and all their otherworldly animals, probably belong at the top of the list. Mr. Darwin found inspiration there, but the greatest experiments began more than a century later. I can think of few more inspiring stories of great science done by great people than the lifetime-long work of Rosemary and Peter Grant. If you haven't yet read The Beak of the Finch, get thee to a library or a bookstore.
2. The Caribbean islands, and especially the Bahamas, are a fruitful laboratory for the study of the (rapid) evolution of lizards called anoles. Jonathan Losos was a major figure in launching and leading that subfield, and his 2017 book Improbable Destinies is a great lay-level exploration of evolution and a resounding rebuttal to the random/luck/contingency views associated with Stephen Jay Gould.
3. The Hawaiian Islands are home to hundreds of species of fruit fly (many of them are biology's adored Drosophila) and zero species of ant. These hundreds of species have all evolved in the last 25 million years! Check out the laboratory of Cassandra Extavour at Harvard for a glimpse into the latest research on the evolution of Hawaiian fruit flies.
4. The Great Lakes of East Africa (including Victoria and Tanganyika) hosted one of the most rapid and spectacular adaptive radiations known to humans. Hundreds (likely thousands) of species of cichlid fish live in these lakes, and all of them were "born" in a blink of evolutionary time.
5. The streams of Trinidad are home to guppies, an unremarkable fact until you learn about one of the best-known experiments in the history of evolutionary biology. Over many years, research teams led by John Endler and David Reznick used this natural laboratory to study natural selection (and other topics) in the wild.
There are surely more. But I'm here to tell you about the one that literally surrounds us here in Tucson.
