Animals, plants and other organisms heave interacted with different species in one way or another for millions of years. These interactions, such as eating each other or competing for living space is thought to be a major force in causing evolution to take place. Until recently these ecological interactions had have only been studied on a few specific groups of organisms such as a few parasites. A group of Spanish scientists have attempted to improve this by looking at evolutionary ecological comparisons between 116 different species, covering a diverse range of organisms across all major known groups. They used a complicated form of statistical analysis, a little bit like an extremely complicated food web, along with the know evolutionary distance of various organisms.
They found that the previous research on specialist ecological interactions appeared to still hold true when scaled up to general ecological interactions involving a wide range of species.
The study was published in the journal Nature:
Reference: Gomez, J.M., Verdu, M. and Perfectti, F. (2010) Ecological interactions are evolutionarily conserved
across the entire tree of life. Nature. 465, 918-922
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