Divenews.com: "Scientist's Persistence Sheds Light on Marine Science Riddle"

Now that's a headline to my liking ;-)

I found this on divenews.com which is of course on my regular blog watch list (via rss). So the story goes like this:

Dr. Gary Rosenberg of the Center for Systematic Biology & Evolution at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, has been compiling mollusk data for years and this has, among other things, resulted in an online database dubbed "Malacolog".

Using this database, Dr. Rosenberg was able to contribute to a long-lasting debate on the so-called Island Rule (aka Foster's Rule), a principle in evolutionary biology stating that members of a species will get smaller or bigger depending on the resources available in the environment.

In Rosenberg's case of marine gastropods (snails) colonizing the deep sea, large-bodied species become smaller and small-bodied species become larger.

In his original 1964 paper in the journal Nature, titled "The evolution of mammals on islands", J. Bristol Foster proposed the simple explanation that smaller creatures got larger in the absence of so many predators that they had been used to on the mainland and larger creatures get smaller with the absence of food sources.

To this Rosenberg commented: "Only resource limitation clearly applies to deep-sea animals. We know there is less food available in the deep sea than in shallow water, but the area of the deep sea is much larger. ... A lot more study needs to be done on the relative importance of these factors, but clearly resource limitation is a key factor in the evolution of size."

Well, this is definitely one boost for long-term data collection efforts and especially for organisation of this knowledge into databases.

Good to see this kind of headlines in a mainstream scuba news feed, too!