How did specific organisms only get to certain islands?
The whole family of honeysuckers in Hawaii as an example -- there and nowhere else?
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Zoological_Distribution
quote:
ZOOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION (also known as Zoogeography), the science dealing, in the first place, with the distribution of living animals on the surface of the globe (both land and water), and secondly with that of their forerunners (both in time and in space). The science is thus a side-branch of zoology,' intimately connected on the one hand with geography and on the other with geology. is a comparatively modern science, which dates, at all events in its present form, from the second half of the 19th century.
Different parts of the land-surface of the globe are inhabited by different kinds of animals, or, in other words, by different faunas. These differences, in many cases at any rate, are not due to differences of temperature or of climate; and they do not depend on the distance of one place from another. The warm-blooded land-animals of Japan are, for example, very much more closely related to those of the British Isles than is the corresponding fauna of Africa to that of Madagascar. Again, on the hypothesis of the evolution of one species from another, in the case of land-animals unprovided with the means of flight such resemblances and differences between the faunas of different parts of the world depend in a great degree on the presence or absence of facilities for free communication by land between the areas in question. Prima facie, therefore, it is natural to suppose that the fauna of an island will differ more from that of the adjacent continent than will those of different parts of that continent from one another.
...peculiar avian families include the birds-of-paradise (Paradiseidae), the honeysuckers (Meliphagidae), and the lyre-birds (Menuridae) among the perching group, the cockatoos (Cacatuidae) and lories (Loriidae) among the parrots, the mound-builders, or brush-turkeys (Megapodiidae) among the game-birds, and the cassowaries and emeus (Casuariidae and Dromaeidae) in the ostrich group. The peculiarity of the region is also marked by the absence of certain widely spread family groups, such as the barbets (Megalaemidae), the otherwise cosmopolitan woodpeckers (Picidae), the trogons (Trogonidae), and the pheasant and partridge tribe (Phasianidae).
Whole interacting ecologies with certain plants and animals that don't exist elsewhere.
And ecologies with certain plants and animals that don't have resistance to common diseases from the rest of the world.
The connections between honeysuckers and migratory ducks and mosquitos imported by sailing vessels (whaling ship bilge water) that could then transfer disease from duck to honeysuckers with devastating results.
Enjoy.
Edited by RAZD, : diseases
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