MAMMALS EVOLVE FASTER ON SMALLER ISLANDS

Island mammals often display remarkable evolutionary changes in size and morphology. Both theory and empirical data support the hypothesis that island mammals evolve at faster rates than their mainland congeners. It is also often assumed that the island effect is stronger and that evolution is faster on the smallest islands. I used a dataset assembled from the literature to test these assumptions for the first time. I show that mammals on smaller islands do indeed evolve more rapidly than mammals on larger islands, and also evolve by a greater amount. These results fit well the theory of an evolutionary burst due to the opening of new ecological opportunities on islands. This evolutionary burst is expected to be the strongest on the smallest islands where the contrast between the island and the mainland environments is the most dramatic.