EARTH.COM - Many stories about how one species branches into several eventually land on the same driving force: competition. Two populations start fighting over the same food, the same space, the same mates.
The losers adapt or disappear. It’s a tidy narrative – but Bryan Jennings, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside, thinks it skips a chapter.
Jennings has spent years puzzling over a gap in adaptive radiation theory – the framework that explains how one ancestor species can fan out into many.