Beetle pollinators of a particular plant are attracted to its flowers by their b

Question

Beetle pollinators of a particular plant are attracted to its flowers by their bright orange color. The beetles not only pollinate the flowers, but they mate while inside of the flowers. A mutant version of the plant with red flowers becomes more common with the passage of time. A particular variant of the beetle prefers the red flowers to the orange flowers. Over time, these two beetle variants diverge from each other to such an extent that interbreeding is no longer possible. Discuss what kind of speciation has occurred in this example, and what has driven it.

Explanation / Answer

Sympatric speciation is the process by which new species of beetles have evolved from a single ancestral species though inhabiting the same geographic region orange or red flowers.

In evolutionary biology and biogeography, sympatric and sympatry are terms referring to organisms whose ranges overlap or are even identical, so that they occur together at least in some places at one point of time .

If these organisms are closely related (e.g.sister species orange and red flower preferences), such a distribution may be the result of sympatric speciation. Etymologically, sympatry is derived from the Greek roots ??? ("together", "with") and ?????? ("homeland" or "fatherland").

Sympatric speciation is one of three traditional geographic categories for the phenomenon of speciation.

Allopatric speciation is the evolution of geographically isolated populations into distinct species. In this case, divergence is facilitated by the absence of gene flow, which tends to keep populations genetically similar.

Parapatric speciation is the evolution of geographically adjacent populations into distinct species. In this case, divergence occurs despite limited interbreeding where the two diverging groups come into contact. In sympatric speciation, there is no geographic constraint to interbreeding. These categories are special cases of a continuum from zero (sympatric) to complete (allopatric) spatial segregation of diverging groups.

In multicellular eukaryotic organisms, sympatric speciation is thought to be an uncommon but plausible process by which genetic divergence (through reproductive isolation) of various populations from a single parent species and inhabiting the same geographic region leads to the creation of new species where interbreeding is not common.

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