Adaptive Radiation in the Compositive Family

Chris: "I've been in the bumming around the deserts as long as I can remember. ... You spend your life with these things and then I just learned so much more about them in the last ten minutes" He says there's a lot of examples of composites that have dispersed to island systems, to archipelago systems. The tree choriosis that grows on the channel islands of California is an example of a plant that's nested inside of a group of mostly ephemeral annuals that grow in desertic or coastal environments. Choriosis has been lumped into a new genus called leptocine but they are diverse enough from the old world.