Sympatric speciation in Nicaraguan crater lake cichlid fish
By M. Barluenga, K. N. Stölting, Walter Salzburger, Moritz Muschick, Axel Meyer. Nature, 2006
716 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Sympatric speciation, the formation of species in the absence of geographical barriers, remains one of the most contentious concepts in evolutionary biology. Although speciation under sympatric conditions seems theoretically possible, empirical studies are scarce and only a few credible examples of sympatric speciation exist. Here we present a convincing case of sympatric speciation in the Midas cichlid species complex (Amphilophus sp.) in a young and small volcanic crater lake in Nicaragua. Our study includes phylogeographic, population-genetic (based on mitochondrial DNA, microsatellites and amplified fragment length polymorphisms), morphometric and ecological analyses. We find, first, that crater Lake Apoyo was seeded only once by the ancestral high-bodied benthic species Amphilophus citrinellus, the most common cichlid species in the area; second, that a new elongated limnetic species (Amphilophus zaliosus) evolved in Lake Apoyo from the ancestral species (A. citrinellus) within less than ∼10,000 yr; third, that the two species in Lake Apoyo are reproductively isolated; and fourth, that the two species are eco-morphologically distinct.
Subfields: Genetics, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b1c7b4f78f94bdd8bcfc3a177d3cdbf9d49cc41
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Citations in the corpus
- Cichlid fishes as models of ecological diversification: patterns, mechanisms, and consequences (2015, background): “Similar to Afrotropical lineages, diversification along a benthic–pelagic gradient has occurred independently among numerous Neotropical lake cichlids (Barluenga et al., 2006; Elmer et al., 2010b; Franchini et al., 2013).”
- Biogeography of the Mesoamerican Cichlidae (Teleostei: Heroini): colonization through the GAARlandia land bridge and early diversification (2013, background): “However, the origins of this diversity remain virtually unstudied except for local studies (Barluenga & Meyer, 2004; Hulsey et al., 2004; Barluenga et al., 2006; Geiger et al., 2010).”
- Analyzing Fluctuating Asymmetry with Geometric Morphometrics: Concepts, Methods, and Applications (2015, methodology): “Alternative approaches, such as using various ad-hoc procedures for identifying a median axis from just some landmarks [215–221] or ignoring the symmetry of the structure altogether [227–230], seem clearly inferior to the Procrustes approach for object symmetry.”
- Ecological Opportunity and Adaptive Radiation (2016, background): “This argument has been made particularly forcefully for adaptive radiations occurring on small islands or lakes where the opportunity for allopatry is not obvious (Schliewen et al. 1994, Barluenga et al. 2006, Kautt et al. 2012, Martin & Feinstein 2014; but see Martin et al. 2015).”
- The Lake Tanganyika cichlid species assemblage: recent advances in molecular phylogenetics (2008, background): “…to have contributed to the cichlid diversity in the species flocks of Lakes Malawi and Victoria as well as of West African and Central American crater lakes, although convincing evidence comes from a few studies only (Schliewen et al., 1994, 2001; Schliewen & Klee, 2004; Barluenga et al., 2006).”
- Demography and Genetic Structure of a Recovering Grizzly Bear Population (2009, methodology): “We used FST (Weir and Cockerham 1984, Barluenga et al. 2006) to estimate genetic differentiation between regions and visualized these values with Fitch trees (Fitch and Margoliash 1967).”