Digest: Repeated body size evolution in island bats.

Abstract

Island ecosystems represent outstanding natural laboratories for studying the interplay between ecology and evolution. In this issue, Lavery et al. (2024) use genomic approaches to identify a remarkable example of repeated evolution in Hipposideros bats across the Solomon Islands archipelago. They show that larger-bodied bats have independently evolved on different islands, highlighting an exciting new system for exploring the ecological and evolutionary drivers of repeated evolution in mammals.