Sympatry - Evolving Definitions and Controversy

Evolving Definitions and Controversy

The lack of geographic isolation as a definitive barrier between sympatric species has yielded controversy among ecologists, biologists, and zoologists regarding the validity of the term. As such, researchers have long debated the conditions under which sympatry truly applies, especially with respect to parasitism. Because parasitic organisms often inhabit multiple hosts during a life cycle, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated that internal parasites existing within different hosts demonstrate allopatry, not sympatry. Today, however, many biologists consider parasites and their hosts to be sympatric (see examples below). Conversely, zoologist Michael JD White considered two populations sympatric if genetic interbreeding was viable within the habitat overlap. This may be further specified as sympatry occurring within one deme; that is, reproductive individuals must be able to locate one another in the same population in order to be sympatric.

Others question the ability of sympatry to result in complete speciation: until recently, many researchers considered it nonexistent, doubting that selection alone could create disparate, but not geographically separated, species. In 2003, biologist Karen McCoy suggested that sympatry can act as a mode of speciation only when “the probability of mating between two individuals depend on their genotypes, dispersed throughout the range of the population during the period of reproduction.”. In essence, sympatric speciation does require very strong forces of natural selection to be acting on heritable traits, as there is no geographic isolation to aid in the splitting process. Yet, recent research has begun to indicate that sympatric speciation is not as uncommon as was once assumed.