The tale of a fateful trip: How iguanas populated Fiji

Posted April 1, 2025

Tropical islands like Hawaii, Tahiti, and Fiji offer locals and tourists alike a range of enticements – lush foliage, balmy weather, and beaches galore. But for biologists, who view such places not just through tinted sunglasses, but also through the lens of evolution, these vacation destinations offer intriguing mysteries as well. Such islands were produced by volcanic activity, arising out of the ocean devoid of life. So each represents a compelling test case of evolution in action starting from scratch. How did the ancestors of the living things that inhabit these islands today get there in the first place? How did each newly arrived species change the environment for the next? How did they all evolve once they arrived? How did waves of human migration shape the evolutionary trajectories of these isolated ecosystems? Last month, biologists announced the results of a study that solves one of these mysteries: how iguanas arrived on Fiji.

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