JOHANNESBURG: King Kong may be a far-fetched creation of Hollywood but scientists say the big ape has some basis in biological fact: animals on islands often evolve into gigantic versions of their mainland kin.
“There is a whole body of research on islands which suggests gigantism occurs on them but of course nothing on the scale of King Kong,” said Sue Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist and director of the global species programme for WWF International.
“There is evidence that this happens because of isolation and a lack of competition ... the further an island is from the mainland the more potential there is for the evolution of new species,” she told Reuters by telephone from Rome.
King Kong, which is reigning at the North American box office this holiday season, is a remake of the 1930s classic about a giant gorilla found on an uncharted island.
Besides falling for the female lead, director Peter Jackson’s ape battles predatory dinosaurs on an island that is also inhabited by titanic bats and bugs.
Jackson’s monsters may be a stretch, but it is a fiction which mirrors some strange facts about island life.
“Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation,” writes David Quammen in his book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction.
There are many examples of what biologists term ‘gigantism’ on islands.
These include the Komodo dragons, the world’s largest lizards which can be three metres (10 feet) long or more and weigh up to 225kg.
Found on a few small Indonesian islands, the Komodo — a recorded man-eater — is in many ways as chilling as anything from Jackson’s fertile imagination.
Some of these quirks of evolution have occurred in a matter of decades — an astonishing speed.
On remote Gough Island in the South Atlantic, ‘monster mice’ are eating metre-high albatross chicks alive, threatening rare bird species on the world’s most important seabird colony.—Reuters
