None of which seem to apply to the bacteria at the moment. (There's a little biology lesson for you all.)
Uh, yeah. That would be obvious, considering bacteria do not reproduce sexually*. I mean, the same can be said of fossils. How do you know fossil A is a different species from fossil B? You simply can't get them to prove they're different species anymore when they're
dead. In these cases, it's back to the old 'do these two look the same to you' method. In this case specifically, the new emerged trait is radically different from anything the strain has come up with previously. Sizing this up, it's like a group of koalas starting to eat something other than eucalyptus leaves. When koalas that eat slightly different eucalyptus leaves are different species, what does this mean for the bacteria when he starts to metabolise something the rest of his strain can't?
Problem with evolution religion hasn't: explaining evolution requires time, effort, and a remotely intelligent audience. Explaining religion requires someone to say "god said it and therefore so and so is true" and a gullible audience.
*Or rather, there is no such thing as a common gene pool in asexual organisms, because they do not pool genes. When a population
does have a common gene pool, genes 'mingle' and each set won't be very different from another of the same population. When a part of the original population gets isolated, however, it gets harder for genes to mix and differences will accrue until the two populations couldn't reproduce even if they wanted to (and thus being distinct species). There is, however,
something resembling a gene pool in bacteria, since some can transduce (their or plasmid) DNA to another, and some can also incorporate loose DNA from dead bacteria. You could speak of different species of bacteria when (some of) these things become impossible between two types of bacteria.