Ecological Opportunity and Adaptive Radiation

The process of adaptive radiation--the proliferation of species from a single ancestor and diversification into many ecologically different forms--has been of great interest to evolutionary biologists since Darwin. Since the middle of the last century, ecological opportunity has been invoked as a potential key to understanding when and how adaptive radiation occurs. Interest in the topic of ecological opportunity has accelerated as research on adaptive radiation has experienced a resurgence, fueled in part by advances in phylogenetic approaches to studying evolutionary diversification. Nonetheless, what the term actually means, much less how it mechanistically leads to adaptive diversification, is currently debated; whether the term has any predictive value or is a heuristic useful only for post hoc explanation also remains unclear. Recent recognition that evolutionary change can occur rapidly and on a timescale commensurate with ecological processes suggests that it is time to synthesize ecological and evolutionary approaches to the study of community assembly and evolutionary diversification.