• 
  The keys to the development of new species (a process known as speciation) include:
  
• 
  small populations budding off into new environments,
  
  different adaptations, and
  
  isolation that inhibits interbreeding between the new and old populations.
  
  

The degrees of difference between species may be very small. You will be exposed in class to a number of examples of how the process of speciation works. Explore the nature of change in each case and how these correlate to the degrees of differences in adaptation.

In Hawaii, there is a plant called the Silver Sword. This plant is highly adapted to a dry environment of a volcano crater. It expends all of its energy to bloom once before it will die. It is balanced on the edge as another oddity of nature, yet it is effectively adapted. Part of the story of the Silver Sword is untold if we do not consider the fact that like every other lifeform on Hawaii, the Silver Sword is a transplant - a migrant to Hawaii from some other place. The Silver Sword is a part of family of plants the have adapted to very different conditions once they arrived on Hawaii. In fact, there is a plant that genetically is a "kissing cousin" to the Silver Sword that has adapted not to a dry environment but to a tropical rainforest environment. These two plants are so close that they can produce a hybrid offspring - meaning they are not distinct species although to look at them you would call them two different - very different in fact - plants.