Mosaic Evolution of Subterranean Mammals

Book excerpt: Subterranean life exists within an extraordinary environment and has evolved among different groups of mammals all over the globe. With relatively constant temperature, few opportunities to meet organisms other than the immediate family, and a completely different sensory environment, the evolution of such life is fascinating. Locomotion, communication, food-finding, navigation, circadian rhythms, and indeed the whole of the animals' physiology may be specialized to cope with life underground. And from burrowing to blindness, magnetic communication to the weird bee-like eusociality of blind mole rats, specialization has been extreme and has led to speciation in a whole range of new contexts. That the subterranean way of life occurs in different species of mammals across the globe has provided scientists with one of nature's best studied global evolutionary demonstrations of adaptive radiation and speciation. The revolution in molecular biology that has occurred over the last ten years has massively expanded these horizons, allowing scientists to explore, map, and clone the genes underlying the basis of adaptation and speciation and translate their fascinating structural and functional evolution into genes and genomic language. This book draws together the burgeoning literature about all aspects of the biology of subterranean mammals. Beginning with their evolutionary history and the processes that led to the subterranean way of life, the author reviews ecology, behavior, and physiology within the context of the highly stressful subterranean context, considers the specialization that has evolved in response, and then compares the eleven families of extant subterranean mammals. The incredible circumstances surrounding subterranean mammals present a unique, global, 'natural experiment' in evolution that has implications throughout biology. As such, this broad survey will stand as an invaluable reference to evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and molecular biologists for years to come.