Why are there hopping mice in Australia however no kangaroos in Asia? It is a lengthy story

The animals in Australia are super-different to these in Asia. This goes with out saying; we all know Australia is filled with bizarre creatures discovered nowhere else on Earth, such because the platypus and the koala.

However it might shock you to know that lots of our most iconic critters got here from Asia and arrived solely lately (in geological phrases, at the very least).

These most up-to-date members of Australia’s attribute fauna embrace many lizards, comparable to goannas and thorny devils, and different animals together with hopping mice, flying foxes and the kookaburra. But the visitors was largely a method—there are far fewer representatives of Australian fauna in Asia than there are Asian fauna in Australia.

Why is the scenario so asymmetrical? In a examine printed immediately within the journal Science, my colleagues and I analyzed details about the distribution and habitat of 20,433 species of land-dwelling vertebrates—in addition to local weather and plate tectonics over the previous 30 million years—to seek out out.

Drifting continents on a cooling planet

The story begins greater than 200 million years in the past.

Dinosaurs have been nonetheless a reasonably new group strolling the Earth, and Australia was a part of a supercontinent referred to as Gondwana. This large landmass included fashionable Antarctica, South America, Africa, Australia and India.

Gondwana had simply damaged off from one other supercontinent, referred to as Laurasia, which was smooshed collectively from fashionable North America, Europe and Asia. The separation of Gondwana and Laurasia eliminated the final land connection between Australia and Asia.

Now, Gondwana itself started to fall half fairly shortly after separating from Laurasia. Each bit of Gondwana regularly grew to become remoted and commenced its personal unbiased journey. Many of those journeys led them again to Laurasia.

India collided with Eurasia and shaped the mighty Himalaya; South America crashed into North America, forming the snaking land bridge of Panama; Africa ran into Eurasia, forming the Mediterranean Sea; and Australia started on a collision course with Asia.

Australia untethered its ultimate Gondwanan connections between 45 and 35 million years in the past, when it broke off from Antarctica.

At the moment, Australia was a lot additional south than it’s immediately. Because it drifted northwards, the growing area between Australia and Antarctica kick-started the Antarctic circumpolar present, which cooled the planet dramatically.

Australia was remoted, cooling down and drying out. A novel set of animals and vegetation started to evolve.

Intercontinental stepping stones

In the meantime, the Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates started to collide, forming 1000’s of islands within the Indonesian archipelago, together with immediately’s Lombok, Sulawesi, Timor, and Lesser Sunda Isles.

These islands do not belong to both the Australian continental shelf (also called Sahul), which incorporates Australia and New Guinea, or to the Asian continental shelf (generally known as Sunda), which incorporates Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Bali.

This in-between zone is named Wallacea, after the nineteenth century British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace. He first noticed a distinction within the varieties of animals discovered on both facet of what’s now referred to as Wallace’s line.

The islands grew to become stepping stones between two continents whose teams of species hadn’t seen one another in a really, very very long time. However, as our new analysis reveals, solely specific sorts of animals have been in a position to make the crossing and set up themselves on the opposite facet.

Moist and dry

The primary issue figuring out which animals unfold between continents was their skill to cross the ocean.

Of all of the teams of animals that moved between Asia and Australia, we discovered the staggering majority have been birds.

However this wasn’t the one key to success.

Animals additionally wanted to have the ability to thrive of their new location, the place the surroundings could have been fairly completely different. We discovered animals that would tolerate a broad vary of wetter and drier environments have been extra more likely to make the transfer efficiently.

This is sensible. Sunda is moist and Sahul is dry, and in the event you can tolerate extra of that moist–dry spectrum, you’re higher geared up to maneuver between these areas.

However we nonetheless have an enormous query. Why did extra animals transfer from Sunda to Sahul than within the different course?

So much can change in 30 million years

The ultimate piece of the puzzle is contemplating how these essential components—the flexibility for species to disperse and set up themselves in new environments—have modified over time.

We all know Sunda has been dominated by lush tropical rainforest since earlier than Australia broke away from Antarctica. Later, when the stepping-stone islands started to pop up, additionally they had the sort of humid equatorial local weather favored by the rainforest vegetation, and later animals, from Sunda.

In Australia, nonetheless, related rainforests have been shrinking and being changed by grasslands and woodlands in most areas.

What this implies is that as animals transfer from Sunda, by means of the stepping-stone islands, to New Guinea and the northern ideas of Australia in Sahul, they expertise a band of comparable humid tropical local weather.

Nevertheless, most animals in Sahul developed on the Australian mainland, most of which was a lot drier. So transferring from mainland Australia, by means of New Guinea and the stepping stones, to Sunda, requires variations to a really completely different surroundings.

And Australian animals that did handle to make their manner onto the stepping-stone islands would have seemingly met competitors from Sunda teams already fortunately present of their most well-liked tropical local weather.

Solutions are a very long time within the making

Local weather and geography are among the most essential issues that form evolution and the distributions of various species. Taking the lengthy view, deep into the previous, helps us perceive the world round us.

Easy questions—like “why are there no kangaroos in Asia however hopping mice in Australia?”—have solutions which are a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of years within the making.

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