There are around 10 million different species of eukaryotes on this planet. Including prokaryotes wouldincrease our estimate of the number of extant species on our planet drastically. Understanding why thereis so much diversity on Earth has been one of the central questions in evolution and ecology. Rainey andTravisano (1998) attempted to answer certain aspects of this question in the lab. As their modelorganism, they used a prevalent aerobic bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens.Starting from a monomorphic population of P. fluorescens , they allowed bacterial cells to grow in a staticbroth culture, i.e., a beaker that is not shaking. The morphology of the ancestral population could bedescribed as “smooth”, referring to the smooth colonies it would form on a petri dish. It has been shownthat two other morphologies are possible in P. fluorescens : wrinkly spreader and fuzzy spreader (Figure1).