A new method to measure the extent to which regional geographic features affect local rates of speciation, extinction and dispersal has been developed by biologists. They used their model to show the movement of neotropical anole lizards.
The first author of the study published in the PNAS was Michael Landis, assistant professor of biology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Predicting which species are most likely to move, evolve or go extinct as climate change increases can be done by using such inferences.
Scientists know that geography plays a role in how species colonize new regions and whether widespread species eventually separate out into groups that become genetically distinct, losing the ability to reproduce with each other.
Even though geography plays a significant role in the fate of many individual animal and plant species, no one has developed models that allow geographical features to shape how evolutionary radiations unfold in space. A new model of biogeography was designed to address the gap.
Speciation, extinction and dispersal rates are dependent on the local regional features that each species encounters in its range.
The Anolis lizards are a group of lizards that have spread throughout the Caribbean islands and North and South America.
They learned thatoles tend to move over short distances rather than long distances, and that movements over water are less common than over land.
In other words, far places are far and water is wet, which told us that our new model was in the right ballpark. He proved that the model can quantify relationships between geographical features and evolutionary rates that were previously difficult to measure.
We were able to measure a maximum distance at which species ranges become too widespread to resist splitting in two.
The scientists found that distance impedes the movement of Anolis lizards, both in terms of range expansion through dispersal and in terms of allowing widespread species with fragmented ranges to split into two species.
The effect of distances over water is greater than the effect of distances over land. The model showed that the effect of equivalent distances over land was three times greater than over water.
The people who collaborated with him include Michael Donoghue at Yale University and Felipe Zapata at the University of California, Los Angeles. They think that other biologists will use FIG to test new hypotheses about how other groups of animal and plant species were shaped by the mountains and oceans.
It is difficult to get biogeographers to agree on the extent to which distances should affect how species spread over millions of years.
We invented some statistical tools to model how geographical features might influence speciation, extinction and dispersal rates among closely related evolutionary lineages.
More information: Phylogenetic inference of where species spread or split across barriers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2116948119. Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Citation: New model predicts how geographic features influence evolutionary outcomes (2022, March 21) retrieved 21 March 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-03-geographic-features-evolutionary-outcomes.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
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