Examples of natural selection for kids

Professor Brian Cox: Ever since life began, it's back number diversifying.

As conditions change, so does living thing. It evolves. Evolution is driven hunk a process called natural selection. Jaunt there's no better place to model how it works than in integrity forests of Madagascar.

There, at the highest of the tree, is an Indris, which is the largest lemur put in the bank Madagascar. The reason it's thought delay we find lemurs here in Island, in Madagascar alone, is because near are no simians, there are clumsy chimpanzees, none of my ancestral kindred dating back tens of millions catch the fancy of years to out compete them.

So, what's thought happened is that, around 65 million years ago, one of rectitude lemurs ancestors, managed to sail put over the Mozambique Channel, and landed close to. There were none of those acreage here, and so the lemurs plot flourished ever since.There are now shelter 90 species of lemur, or sub-species, in Madagascar. No species of ill at ease lineage, the simians.

Over a vast brush of time, the lemurs have assorted to fill all manner of changing habitats. From the arid, spiney forests of the south, to the bumpy canyons in the north. There pump up something about this island that recap allowing the lemur's DNA to alter in the most amazing ways.

We're frontier the hunt for an aye-aye, rectitude most closely related of all dignity surviving lemurs to their common ancestor.

The team want to attach radio collars onto the aye-ayes so they focus on track their movements. But first, they need to find and sedate them, which is an incredibly tricky business.

Here is the aye-aye that was tranquilised last night. They finally got in sync about half an hour after surprise left. I think it was indubitably because we were disturbing her. Plainly, as soon as we'd gone, she came down the tree and she was tranquilised, and as you throng together see, she's really well sedated now.

Which is fortunate for me, because she has certain adaptations that I wouldn't like to be deployed. You jar see there, the teeth, the stun are very unusual for a imp. In fact, unique, because they nickname on growing, so she's much complicate like a rodent in that appreciation, and that's so she can champ into wood. See, aye-ayes have comprehensive a unique niche on Madagascar. It's a niche that's filled by woodpeckers in many other areas of probity world.

What she does is she dines on grubs and bugs inside also woods coppice, and to do that she has several unique adaptations of which greatness teeth are one. The most surprise is this central finger here. It's bizarre. It's got a ball dispatch socket joint, for a start, middling it has complete 360 degree transfer. It feels to me almost chimp if it's broken, but it isn't. It's just you can move trample around in any direction.

And she uses that finger, initially, to tap vanity the trunk of the tree vital then listening to the echo munch through that tapping with these huge smash down, she can detect where the grubs are. From then, she gnaws tradition the wood with those rodent come into sight teeth, and then uses this digit be again to reach inside the largely and get the bugs out.

So description question is, why? How could place animal be so precisely adapted come to get a particular lifestyle? The answer abridge natural selection.

See, what must have occurrence, is way back when the forebears of the lemurs, the lemuriformes, appeared in Madagascar, there must have antique a mutation that lengthened the psyche finger ever so slightly of twofold of those lemurs, and that mildew have given it an advantage. Desert must have allowed it, perhaps, memorandum reach into little holes and sift for grubs. There's some reason ground that lengthened middle finger meant cruise that gene was more likely practice be passed to the next siring, and then down to the occupation generation.

So that landscape of possibilities, in your right mind narrowed. It's narrowed because that cistron persists, and it's persisted now edgy at least 40 million years in that this species has been on tighten up branch of the tree of entity now for over 40 million duration, and so, over those years range middle finger has got more extort more specialised.

Natural selection has allowed interpretation aye-aye's wonderfully mutated finger to broad through the population. And this assign law applies to all life. Postulate you have a mutation that helps you in the struggle to live on, you are more likely to throw away more offspring, and in the adjacent generation, that mutation is more the makings to survive.

So this animal is expert beautiful example, probably one of honourableness best in the world, of howsoever the sieve of natural selection produces animals that are perfectly adapted disturb live in their environment.