Gut Microbes Can Split a Species 68
sciencehabit writes "The community of microbes in an animal's gut may be enough to turn the creature into a different species. Species usually split when their members become so genetically distinct — usually by living in separate environments that cause them to evolve different adaptations (think finches on different islands) — that they can no longer successfully breed with each other. Now researchers have shown that a couple groups of wasps have become new species not because their DNA has changed, but because the bacteria in their guts have changed — the first example of this type of speciation."
Re:meaning (Score:4, Informative)
The whole idea of a species barrier is not actually that well defined in biology. It gets tossed around a lot, but there is not a hard and fast set of agreed upond definitions of what it means. If you have critters that can breed and produce viable offspring, but under normal circumstances will not because of timing or other issues, are they separate species? Or, for another instance, there are these lizards where successive groups of them occupy a more or less crescent shaped space. Each group can breed with the ones nearest it, but the ones at each end of the crescent can't breed with eachother.
Even if it's ill defined, it's a hard concept to entirely escape from, because breeding pools, and diversity both within and between different breeding pools are pretty hard to get away from. But in the community I don't see people getting particularly excited about the term species nearly as much as I see us getting excited about what is actually going on on the ground.