In the fast lane thanks to genome recycling

Lake Victoria in East Africa was completely dry for almost 4,000 years before it filled up with water again 16,000 years ago. Photo: Eawag, Nare Ngoepe - In just 16,000 years, more than cichlid 500 species, distributed throughout the entire food web, have evolved in Lake Victoria. This explosion of biodiversity was made possible by repeated cycles of fusion and diversification in evolutionary lineages, as researchers from Eawag and the University of Bern have described in the "Science" and "Nature" journals. The results underscore that it is not just species that need protection, but entire "species swarms". A good part of the world's biodiversity has evolved through adaptive radiation. This means that when new habitats are colonised, many new, closely related species emerge from a parent species within a few hundred thousand or even ten thousand years, occupying different ecological niches. Examples of this are Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands, chars in Greenland, amphipods in European groundwater streams, or whitefish in the deep lakes near the Alps.