How To Adopt A Child Hawaii

- island archipelagos like galapagos are famous as nurseries of evolution, and equally famous as a nursery of evolution is the hawaiian archipelago. it’s a string of islands,

How To Adopt A Child Hawaii, and they’re very, very young. the oldest island is only about 5 1/2 million years old, and the youngest island is only about 1/2 million years old.

and they’re strung out like a necklace. there’s a tectonic plate moving that way, moving over a hot spot,a volcanic hot spot, which is punching through and making islands, and so it made that one first, then that one, then that one, then those ones, and now most recently, the big island of hawaii. that means that all the evolution that’s gone on in the hawaiian archipelago

has happened within the last few million years. and one of the most spectacular examples is fruit flies, drosophila. drosophila are well known as experimental animals throughout the rest of the world, but on hawaii, they’re especially famous as beautifully sexually selected. they’re kind of insect versions of peacocks. there are lots and lots of species on hawaii,

and they’re all different. they’re all gorgeously colored and shaped, and it’s all because of sexual selection, selection for the most attractive males. here’s a family tree of five different species of hawaiian drosophila, and it’s no accident that the oldest split is between the flies on the oldest islands. and then as you go to successively younger islands,

you get successively more recent splits between the species of fly. drosophila flies show the most elegant courtship behavior. you can see here: a male courting a female. the late john maynard smith, who was one of the great evolutionary biologists, used to to a wonderful imitation of fruit flies courting, the courtship display of fruit flies, flapping his coattails in a most wonderfully comic way.

every species does it in a different way. they display the differences between the wing patterns, and the other characteristic differences between the species. they also have song, a sort of sequence of buzzing noises, which are characteristic of the species-- quite complicated, like cricket song, but different, of course, and it's made by vibrating the wings.

and every species has a different kind of song, a different pattern of song, and the females of the species recognize it. [rhythmic buzzing] [rattling croaking]