Talk:Observed speciation

The literature on observed speciation events is not well organized, but the popular (non-scientific) press has some accounts:


 * Then there’s the swarm of bird-biting London mosquitoes which moved into the tunnels of the Underground in roughly 1900 when the city’s half-built subway system was still occupied primarily by construction crews. Once below the sidewalk, the mosquitoes switched from feeding on feathered fliers to gorging on such delicacies as rats, straphangers, and maintenance workers. By the summer of 1998, the subterranean swarms had changed their genes so thoroughly that they could no longer mate with their distant relatives who lived above the pavement of the street. The pesky Tunnel bugs had taken their genome and gone off on their own, forming an entirely new species.  In reporting the story, Agence France Presse interviewed Roz Kidman Cox, the editor of BBC Wildlife Magazine, the publication responsible for initially breaking the news to a mass audience. Said Kidman Cox, "The scientists we talked to say the differences between the above and below ground forms are as great as if the species had been separated for thousands of years, not just a century.”   A mere one hundred years for a major shift in genes is not the painful crawl invoked by champions of Pleistocene fixation. Instead it is the quick-paced hop that Huxley called saltation.