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St.Kitts Rodent Recovery Day 80
Now that I have ascertained that the Sciurus kittus and the Sciurus nevisus are two different species, I decided to dig deeper into their history, and see what caused the speciation of these rodents. After looking at geologic records, I learned that St. Kitts and Nevis Island were once a combined land form many, many years ago.
Numerous earthquakes had split the island by
a result of the moving of tectonic plates, which was a long, slow
geological process. Nevertheless, over this time, Allopatric speciation occurred,
which divided the one species into two. The original homogenous population
became separated due to the splitting of the land and both groups slowly diverged
from each other because of their own evolutionary course, the accumulation of
gene mutations, as well as natural selection.
And so, after several hundreds of years, these
animals evolved and changed so significantly that they could no longer mate
between each other.
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