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Heteropatry is a concept that refines our notion of sympatry in recognizing that though two variants (genotypes, strains, races) of a population coexist in the same geographical area, these variants are behaviorally separated in terms of exploiting niches that are interwoven to produce a heterogeneous or patchwork landscape. John Maynard Smith in a seminal paper on sympatric speciation [1], recognized the importance of this distinction in facilitating speciation and went so far as to claim that "[sympatric speciation] should perhaps be regarded as a form of allopatric speciation in which isolation is behavioral rather than geographic." In recognition of the importance of this behavioral versus geographic distinction, Wayne Getz and Veijo Kaitala introduced the term heteropatry in their extension of Maynard Smiths' analysis [2].
Although some evolutionary biologists still regard sympatric speciation as a highly contentious issue, both theoretical [3] and empirical [4] studies increasingly support sympatric speciation as a likely process in explaining the diversity of life in particular ecosystems. Arguments either implicitly or explicitly implicate competition and niche separation of sympatrically co-occurring ecological variants that through assortative mating ultimately evolve into separate races and then species. Assortative mating most easily occurs if mating is linked to niche preference, as occurs in the apple maggot Rhagoletis pomonella where individual flies from different races use volatile odors to discriminate between hawthorn and apple and look for mates on natal fruit.
In essence, the term heteropatry semantically resolves the issue of sympatric speciation by reducing it to a scaling issue in terms of the way the landscape is used by individuals versus populations. Specifically, from a population perspective, the process looks sympatric, but from an individual’s perspective, the process looks allopatric, once the time spent flying over or moving quickly through intervening non-preferred niches is taken into account.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ J. Maynard Smith, 1966. Sympatric speciation. Journal of Theoretical Biology 110:637-650.
- ^ W. M. Getz and V. Kaitala, 1989. Ecogenetic models, competition, and heteropatry. Theoretical Population Biology 36:34-58.
- ^ D. I. Bolnick, 2006. Multispecies outcomes in a common model of sympatric speciation. Journal of Theoretical Biology 241:734-744.
- ^ A. A. Forbes, J. Fisher and J. L. Feder, 2005. Habitat avoidance: overlooking an important aspect of host-specific mating and sympatric speciation. Evolution 59:1552-1559.
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