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

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?🧵