Pardo participated in the consortium, on the team that studied the application of natural selection in the specific case of the South American butterflies. The consortium included scientists from Cambridge, Sheffield, and York Universities in the United Kingdom; Harvard University in the United States; the National Museum of Natural History in France; the Smithsonian Institute for Tropical Research in Panama; the University of Adelaide, in Australia, and the Department of Biology of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia.
“This team discovered that the cortex gene, as opposed to how it worked in the moths, had enabled the butterflies to take on bright colors to attract mates and warn predators of their toxicity,” explains Mauricio Linares, Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the Universiad del Rosario and director of the research group on Evolutionary Genetics, Phylogeography, and Ecology of Neotropical Biodiversity, in which Pardo and Salazar both participate. He adds that the two projects provided evidence that despite having been separated from a common ancestor 100 million years ago, the moths and butterflies use the same genetic region to adapt in different fashions to their environments in order to survive.
Carolina Pardo, professor at the
Universidad del Rosario, is part of the team that is studying the application of natural selection in the specific case of South American butterflies.
“Continuing this research will allow us to clarify the molecular and functional details of how the cortex gene Works in order to understand the evolutionary origin of these biological adaptations, not only in insects but also in human beings,” says researcher Mauricio Linares, Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
Evolution over hundreds, not millions of years
Another finding surprised the researchers in both teams. While the cortex gene enabled the adaptation of the butterflies millions of years ago, in the case of the British moths it did so only 200 years back. According to scientists at the University of Liverpool, the change took place in 1819.
Furthermore, as British media pointed out, white moths with black markings are increasing in frequency today, since pollution, and the soot it left on trees, has decreased.
“This shows us that evolutionary changes can occur over very short periods of time. We don’t necessarily have to wait thousands or millions of years to see them. It is also evidence that many environmental changes generated by humans can affect nature,” adds Salazar. The Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics underlines that having found that the same gene is used in different ways by different organisms to adapt to such dissimilar ecological environments may teach us an evolutionary principle.