Primary Evolution - Hawai'i

At The Questionable Authority Mike has begun a series on evolution on Hawai'i. As he says,

There are a number of places on this planet where the signal of evolution is readily apparent to anyone who cares to look. Most of those places are islands. It's no coincidence that Darwin made the Galapagos famous, or that Wallace did his most important work in the Malay Archipelago. As helpful as those places were to the discovery of evolution, they pale in comparison with the Hawaiian Islands, and I'm not saying that because I work there. We've got examples of evolution out here that will knock your socks off.

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The Hawaiian Islands are located almost precisely in the middle of nowhere. There is, quite literally, no other archipelago that is so far from the nearest continent. The closest part of North America is currently about 2500 miles from Honolulu; the nearest approach to Asia is about 3500. The extremity of the isolation has two separate effects. The first is that the probability of something reaching Hawaii for the first time is coming from Asia isn't all that different from the probability that it's come from North America, so the biota here has a very mixed origin - unlike, for example, the Galapagos, which are also Darwinian islands, but are so close to the coast of South America that their endemic life has a very clear South American flavor. The second effect that the huge distances separating Hawaii and the continents has is that it makes it very hard for things to find their way out to the islands. New arrivals are rare, which gives the ones that were there before much more opportunity to evolve in piece. It also means that there are some common ecological niches on the continents that are either unfilled or filled in strange ways in Hawaii, because the continental occupants were unable to make it here on their own.

Keep checking back there for the series, which promises to be an excellent one.