Carp that invade new territories evolve a larger body size twice as fast as the species they left behind.
Moving a species to a new environment is usually seen as a temporary ecological shock, but it actually rewires its evolutionary trajectory. A global analysis of carp lineages shows that the act of being invasive triggers a massive acceleration in physical traits. These fish grow larger and adapt to their new homes at a rate that is more than double that of native populations. This suggests that human-mediated movement is one of the most powerful evolutionary forces on the planet today. We are not just moving animals around, we are fundamentally changing what they will become in the distant future.
Invasiveness reshapes the historical pattern of carp trait evolution
EcoEvoRxiv · 10.32942/X22389
Human-mediated invasions are increasingly recognised as contemporary ecological disturbances with profound impacts on microevolutionary processes. However, whether such impacts extend beyond microevolutionary change to alter long-term evolutionary trajectories across lineages remains poorly explored. Using a global phylogenetic analysis of nearly 1,400 carp species (freshwater fishes of the family Cyprinidae), we show that invasiveness accelerates body size evolution more than twofold compared t