Chapter 6 The second island guide

different islands Biogeography, mentioned at the end of the previous article, is a science that studies the facts and patterns of the distribution of species, discussing which places have which animals, which places have which plants, and which places do not have these animals and plants.For example, on the island of Madagascar in southeastern Africa, there used to be an animal similar to an ostrich, standing ten feet tall and weighing about half a ton, running across the island with a pair of elephant-like legs.This bird, which weighed a thousand pounds, including feathers, flesh, and bones, did exist. I saw its bones and its volume in a crumbling museum in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. Two gallons of eggs.

listen!It is not some imaginary monster, nor is it the legend of Herodotus (Greek historian) or Marco Polo.Paleontologists call it the Elephant Bird (Aepyornis maximus), and they have been active in Madagascar until humans migrated here millions of years ago, hunting, looting, and cooking those giant eggs, changing the environment it lives in. ecosystem.A thousand years ago, this island was the only place where elephant birds could be found, but now we can only imagine the heroic appearance of this giant bird that was active on the earth for a while in museums. It's the biogeographer's job to tell you that.

As careful researchers, biogeographers don't know what species?And live where?To satisfy them, they further explored why the species can survive there? , and the even more subtle question why doesn't a certain species inhabit a certain place? As another example, Bali Island in Indonesia, a small island made of volcanic rocks in the east of Java and famous for its rice terrace landscape, once had a unique subspecies of tiger called the Panthera tigris balica.There is another subspecies of the Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica) on Java, but not on Lombok Island (in southern Indonesia), which is separated from Bali by a 20-mile strait to the east of Bali. Native tiger habitat.

Today, the Bali tiger has disappeared from this world, even in zoos.The disappearance of this animal is caused by the interlaced influence of some common factors.The Javan tiger may also be extinct, although there is still hope.Huying may still be seen occasionally in Sumatra, but that is a different subspecies of tiger. Currently, tigers can still be found in some parts of the Asian continent, but not in the northwestern part of the continent, Africa and Europe.In the past, tiger tracks went as far west as Turkey, but they are no longer seen today.Besides, Lombok Island is not smaller than Bali Island, and the forest is equally dense, but there has never been a native tiger.

Why exactly?why not?What is the reason?Observing these facts and finding explanations is biogeography.If the research focus is set on some specific islands, it is called island biogeography. Dreamy off-land area I'm happy to tell you that island biogeography is full of thrills and wonders.Many of the most beautiful life in the world, whether it is animals or plants, all come from islands. There are huge creatures on the island, and there are small and inexplicable animals and plants, which are intertwined like artists with their own strengths. These amazing creatures inhabit the remote, dreamlike osland region, making the word osland biologically synonymous with variety.Madagascar is home to the smallest chameleon on earth (and one of the smallest land vertebrates), measuring only about an inch in length; the rare pygmy hippopotamus also once called Madagascar home, now extinct; Komodo There are huge lizards lurking on (Komodo), whose carnivorous characteristics are like the legendary dragons; there is another marine iguana on the Galapagos (Gaslapagos) in western Ecuador that lives on seagrass.

In the central highlands of New Guinea, you can catch a glimpse of the poetic bird of paradise, which is about the size of a crow but has gorgeous long feathers trailing like ribbons on its tail.When it takes off in the wind, the tail like a kite across the clear blue sky is simply beautiful; Aldabra Island (Aldabra) is a small coral reef island in the Indian Ocean, where there is a giant turtle. It is not as loud as the Galapagos tortoise, but its dazzling appearance makes it hard to compare with its opponents. Saint Helena has a gigantic centipede, the largest and most repulsive dermatopteran living world; and Java has a rather peculiar pygmy rhinoceros.

It is well known that Australia has its own unique species of kangaroos and other marsupials︱But on the neighboring island of Tasmania (Tasmania, located in the southeast of Australia), there are strange species of marsupials that are not seen even on the Australian mainland But there is a kind of rattlesnake on Santa Catalina Island (Saint Catalina) in the Gulf of California, and its tail is actually silent. There is a species of spotted wedge-toothed lizard (tautara) in New Zealand. During the Triassic period before the peak of dinosaurs, beak-faced reptiles multiplied in large numbers, and this is the only one that has survived so far; In Mauritius, an island country in Africa, Dodo was once active.Because islands provide refuge and breeding places for those unique and alternative creatures, islands seem to be a kind of unorthodox nature's evolution laboratory.

This explains why island biogeography is dominated by eccentrics, and why these islands, known as outlanders, continue to play a major role in the study of evolution.Think back then, Charles.Darwin (Charles Darwin, 1809︱1882) was also an island biogeographer before he became famous! The Adventures of Wallace and Hook In addition to Darwin, great pioneers of evolutionary biology such as Wallace (Alfred Russel Wallace, 1823︱1913, British naturalist) and Hooker (Joseph Hooker, 1817︱1911, British botanist explorer) and other outstanding figures also came from It was during field work on some remote islands that he was able to realize his originality.

Wallace spent a total of eight years collecting samples in the Malay Archipelago, an island kingdom (very rich in biodiversity) that is now known as Indonesia.Hook, like Darwin, was very lucky to get the support of the Queen, providing the Erebus (the Erebus, Greek mythology, meaning the chaotic area between Yin and Yang) for him to embark on a global voyage expedition, just like Darwin's Beagle generally.On this ship, Hook traveled all the way to Tasmania, New Zealand and an interesting small island called Kerguelen, which is now only known to be located in Antarctica and somewhere between.During this expedition, Hooker obtained so much material that he continued to publish his observations of New Zealand and other islands during that voyage decades later.

Island biology, beginning with Darwin, Wallace, and Hooker, continued into the twentieth century and is now found in New Guinea, Hawaii, the West Indies, and Krakatau in the Southwest Pacific. Some important research has been done.In 1967, an epoch-making work in biogeography, a pamphlet titled "The Theory of Island Biogeography" (The Theory of Island Biogeography) was published.This is a bold, rich, and provocative book by two young men who took ideas from ecology and put them into biogeography, and made them mathematical It is inseparable from the relationship and is inseparable from mathematics.These two young men are Rob.MacArthur (Robert MacArthur, 1939︱1972, see the sixth part of the second volume "Truncating the length to make up for the shortcomings") and Edward.Wilson (Edward 0. Wilson, 1929︱, a leader in the field of biological theory in the United States today), and their mathematical theorems are deduced from the distribution pattern of ants discovered by Wilson in Melanesia.

Islands have the characteristics of limited size and closed isolation. The synergy of these two factors makes islands particularly helpful in highlighting evolutionary patterns.Here again I want to stress an important fact: islands allow the contours of evolution to emerge.On one island, colonies of giant tortoises, flightless birds weighing half a ton and pygmy hippopotamuses can be seen.Generally speaking, there are fewer biological species on the island (compared to the mainland), and their interrelationships are naturally simpler, and there are also more cases of extinction.The sum of all these factors is a simplified ecosystem, but it is the closest and most capable of simulating the complex natural system.Islands thus serve as an introduction to evolutionary biology, providing researchers with sufficient vocabulary and grammar to master.Let’s interpret this more complex essay from Mainland China. "The Origin of Species" and "The Theory of Island Biogeography" are two great works in the concept of epoch-making biology, and they can be fully attributed to the study of islands.Another book, Island Life, was the first book on biogeography, published by Wallace in 1880. Wallace is actually an honest man of ordinary background, ranking eighteen in his family, with kind and ordinary parents.At that time, his father had been trained as a pleading lawyer, but he never practiced. Instead, he became a librarian, occasionally playing business or growing vegetables.Later, Wallace's father went bankrupt due to investment mistakes and could not gain a foothold in the middle class. At the age of fourteen, Wallace had to drop out of school to work, and he joined the surveying industry, which seemed to mean that the rest of his life had to be spent in hard, ordinary, and narrow jobs.Unexpectedly, Wallace did not bow to fate. He used his evening time to study by himself in the place where he worked or in the library, and then quit his job and left England to become a young and wild explorer.In the end Wallace became the greatest field biologist of the nineteenth century. Anyone who knew him knew that the guy had a similar idea in his head long before Darwin published his theory of fame. Charles.Darwin was a generation ahead of Wallace and completed his eye-opening journey on the Beagle, twenty years before Wallace.After returning from the voyage, Darwin realized his great theory, but in Victoria's early environment, such a concept would be regarded as heresy.The cautious Darwin spent another twenty years conceiving in secret.This heretical theory is: the evolution of species has existed since ancient times, through survival competition and the survival of the fittest, which is what Darwin called natural selection (natural selection, or translated natural selection, natural selection), one species evolves into another species, and direct descendants It inherits the characteristics of its ancestors, but also undergoes constant changes from generation to generation. Some of Darwin’s predecessors in evolution, such as Lamarck (Jean Baptiste Lamarck, 1744︱1829, a French evolutionary scientist who first proposed the theory of biological evolution), Buffon (Georges Buffon, 1707︱1788, a French naturalist) and others Grandfather Arismas.Darwin (Erasmus Darwin) already had the idea that the emergence of species evolved through a certain form, but because the inspiration of natural selection had never flashed in their minds, none of them could further explain how species evolved.Darwin carefully treasured such a precious treasure of wisdom as the theory of natural selection deep in his heart, and spent twenty years collecting more evidence, organizing the theoretical framework, and making this theory more complete. No one expected that one day Darwin suddenly received a letter from an unknown young man, which stated exactly the theory that Darwin had buried in his heart for a long time. The believer Wallace has a glimpse of the mystery of the theory of natural selection in his own way. After a brief internal battle, Darwin believed that the fruits of his life's work had given Wallace the upper hand. But the development of things turned around. After Hooker mediated, finally, Wallace's and Darwin's theories were published at the same time.However, due to a number of reasons, one side benefited and the other suffered. Most of the glory and achievements belonged to Darwin, and Wallace did not get the compensation he deserved.However, these are only a brief statement of a story of grievances and grievances. Many complex links will be detailed in this book, including how Wallace became the originator of biogeography in the future. Most people in the world think that Darwin was an excellent theorist, and Hooke was the outstanding botanist of his time.As for Wallace, he was penniless in his later years devoted to idiosyncratic interests such as the Land Nationalization Society, the anti-vaccination movement, and spiritualism, and history has left him with an injustice.But in my eyes, I still think Wallace is the most charming hero among the three.Perhaps, this is my personal paranoia. On June 13, 1856, Wallace arrived in Bali after a 20-day voyage on the Rose of Japan sailing ship from Singapore.But Bali is not the man's destination, he just passes through on the way to Celebes. During his two-day stay in Bali, Wallace routinely collected some birds and insects, surveyed the local terrain, and then took the Japanese Rose to the neighboring Lombok Island.