In today's tropical botany course at our Department of Systematics and Evolutionary Botany I talked about Gesneriaceae, Asteraceae, Araliaceae and Bignoniaceae. I am very grateful to the gardeners for providing us all the amazing plants
www.bg.uzh.ch/de.html

In our @pnas.org study in collaboration with Søren Faurby, Rodrigo Cámara and Alex Pigot, we test these questions on palms 🌴 and conifers 🌲and it is open access here:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How frequent is this phenomenon in plants more broadly? And does speciation always involve visible morphological differences?

One exceptional case in plants, involving Howea palms 🌴 on a remote island, sparked intense debate but has since been confirmed as a true instance of sympatric #speciation. That discovery also raised new questions such as:

While some animal species—like crater lake cichlids or parasitic Indigobirds—have shown that it is possible for species to split without being separated by physical barriers (a process known as sympatric speciation), such empirical examples are rare. (picture from earthlife.net)

How do species diverge? Could the relative immobility of plants increase their likelihood of speciating in the same place?🧵