A gold morph of the Hawaiian stick spider (genus: Ariamnes)GEORGE RODERICKThe Hawaiian stick spider has evolved the same three color morphs on multiple different islands in parallel, according to research led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The team’s findings, published today (March 8) in Current Biology, provide a rare example of evolution producing the same outcome multiple times and could throw light on the factors constraining evolutionary change.
“The possibility that whole communities of these spiders have evolved convergently is certainly exciting,” Ambika Kamath, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who didn’t take part in the study, tells The Atlantic. She adds that the study provides insight into the “deterministic processes that shape the diversity of life.”
To study the stick spider’s biological past, evolutionary ecologist Rosemary Gillespie of UC Berkeley and her colleagues collected samples of the most prominent color morphs—each camouflaged for a different habitat—on Hawaii’s four largest islands. “You’ve got this dark one that lives in rocks or in bark, a shiny and reflective gold one that lives under leaves, and this one that's a matte white, completely white, that lives on lichen,” Gillespie explains ...
