According to a new study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, the once-extinct Aldabra rail has came back due to the process of “iterative evolution.”
About:
Around 136,000 years ago, the Aldabra atoll in the Indian Ocean was inundated by a major flood that wiped out all the terrestrial animals that lived there including a species of flightless bird called the Aldabra rail.
Tens of thousands of years later, sea levels fell back, once again making life possible on the atoll and the once-extinct Aldabra rail came back due to the process of “iterative evolution.”
Aldabra rail:
The Aldabra rail is a subspecies of the white-throated rail (Dryolimnas cuvieri), a chicken-sized bird which is indigenous to islands in the southwestern Indian Ocean.
The birds are “persistent colonizers”; they are known to build up on large land bodies and subsequently depart en masse, possibly triggered by overcrowding and a lack of food.
At some point in the distant past, rails landed on Aldabra. There were no predators on the atoll, rendering the birds’ ability to fly unnecessary—so they lost it.
And in the wake of the inundation event, the process happened again: Rails arrived on Aldabra and, faced with a lack of predation, once again lost their flight. The Aldabra rail is, in fact, the only flightless rail that still survives in the Indian Ocean.
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