The stuff new species are made of?

A genome-wide linkage map for the threespine stickleback provides a first glimpse of the evolutionary genetic basis of morphological differentiation in a non-model vertebrate. Within extremely short evolutionary time spans, significant adaptive changes of known ecological consequence seem to have been brought about by a surprisingly small number of loci with major phenotypic effects. Niko Tinbergen, one of the recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, shared it with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch for their discovery of several fundamental principles of animal behavior, such as the supernormal stimulus and fixed action patterns. Tinbergen also worked on the mating dance of the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), and like many other researchers after him, he investigated its behavior—and other aspects of its biology—with the expectation that it would teach us generally applicable lessons.