Environments make species. This was the fundamental biology lesson that was drilled into Charles Darwin when he visited the Galápagos Islands back in 1835, a trip that ultimately inspired his theory of natural selection. Nearly 200 years later, scientists in Hawaii have stumbled upon a fascinating evolutionary quirk that would’ve made Darwin proud—the discovery of spiders that are independently and repeatedly evolving the same characteristics over and over again.
This story starts about 3 million years ago, when a single species of stick spider somehow made its way to Hawaii. The new arrivals figured they could make a living as they always had, raiding the webs of other spiders and stealing their prey. But Hawaii was fresh out of the oven at this stage in history, and spider webs were few and far between. The stick spiders had to quickly adapt to their new digs, which they did by trapping and eating other spiders.
Armed with this new strategy, some found it beneficial to hide under rocks. Bam! A new species was created. Another group preferred to hide under leaves. Bam! Another species created. This process, known as adaptive radiation, was read more
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