Where do fish evolve the fastest: warm seas or icy waters?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
If you guessed the tropics, you might want to CHILL.
Enter Mike Burns and team at UC Davis.
They compared over three thousand fish species’ body shapes – from the equator to the poles. They examined these shapes using museum-preserved specimens to measure evolutionary change. Then they modeled those changes over 190 million years to see where evolution runs faster.
And? Fish body shapes evolve twice as fast near the poles.
But polar oceans are warming faster than anywhere else on Earth. We may be disrupting one of evolution’s fastest-moving frontiers.
And that’s cold, man!
Reference: Burns, M. D., Friedman, S. T., Corn, K. A., Wainwright, P. C., Burress, E. D., Larouche, O., & Price, S. A. (2024). High-latitude ocean habitats are a crucible of fish body shape diversification. Evolution Letters, 8(5), 669–679. https://doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrae020