EVOLUTION
For plants, there is a clear direction in which this adaption heads. Once the bigger laurel trees took root, the once open land soon became a forest. Only the steep slopes (of which there fortunately were a lot) kept receiving sunlight. Many of the herbs had to adapt. All the defence against herbivores was unnecessary in the new world, but what was important was the struggle for a bit of sunlight. Therefore, many herbs turned into bushes – the local globularias, foxgloves, sow-thistles, spurges, viper’s-buglosses are not the familiar herbs from the continent, but tall bushes and in some cases even trees. How did these plants manage to adapt? It is the genetic make-up (the genome) of that first and foremost dictates whether it is able to adapt. In new colonisations, something happens with the genome that speeds up the pace of evolution – a process called genetic drift. If you look at the genetic make-up of a large population of plants or animals, some genes (and by extension, some ecological traits) are much more common than others. However, if you focus on an individual, each will lack a few of the common traits and a lot of the rare ones, but it will also carry a few rare genes that most others lack. After all, each individual is unique. When an island is colonised by just a few individuals and the entire new population grows from these organisms (plants, lizards, birds, etc.) so that within a single generation, the genetic make-up of the new population will be different. A few of the common traits of the ancestor will suddenly have disappeared, while some rare traits are all of a sudden common. Blind chance determines the limited available gene pool and it is this that causes genetic change, hence the term genetic drift. Together with the radically different environment, evolution launches the population on the way to become a new species.
LANDSCAPE
31 ...The Madeira Wall Lizard in turn also display an odd behaviour that you won’t observe on the continent. It frequently climbs in flower stalks and feeds on the nectar. It is thought that lizards actually play a role of importance in the pollinisation of certain native plant species.
The Madeiran archipelago has a large diversity of endemic snails (meaning snails that occur nowhere else in the world but here).