Ancient hybridization fuels rapid cichlid fish adaptive radiations
By J. Meier, David Alexander Marques, S. Mwaiko, C. Wagner, Laurent Excoffier, Ole Seehausen. Nature Communications, 2017
633 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Understanding why some evolutionary lineages generate exceptionally high species diversity is an important goal in evolutionary biology. Haplochromine cichlid fishes of Africa’s Lake Victoria region encompass >700 diverse species that all evolved in the last 150,000 years. How this ‘Lake Victoria Region Superflock’ could evolve on such rapid timescales is an enduring question. Here, we demonstrate that hybridization between two divergent lineages facilitated this process by providing genetic variation that subsequently became recombined and sorted into many new species. Notably, the hybridization event generated exceptional allelic variation at an opsin gene known to be involved in adaptation and speciation. More generally, differentiation between new species is accentuated around variants that were fixed differences between the parental lineages, and that now appear in many new combinations in the radiation species. We conclude that hybridization between divergent lineages, when coincident with ecological opportunity, may facilitate rapid and extensive adaptive radiation. Cichlids underwent a rapid diversification in the Lake Victoria region, expanding to more than 700 species within 150,000 years. Here, Meier and colleagues show that an ancient hybridization between two divergent cichlid lineages generated high genetic diversity that facilitated the rapid radiation.
Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43949bf62de6a7d0f77394c52966304f16e9235e
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Citations in the corpus
- Redefining the Role of Admixture and Genomics in Species Conservation (2018, background): “For example, ancient admixture with subsequent introgression of functional variation in Lake Victoria cichlids allowed multiple adaptive radiation events originating from a hybrid swarm (Meier et al. 2017).”
- Hybridization as a conservation management tool (2019, background): “…of a population (Carlson, Cunningham, & Westley, 2014; Chan et al., 2018; Hamilton & Miller 2016; Hoffmann & Sgrò 2011; Jones & Monaco 2009; Meier et al., 2017; van Oppen et al., 2015, 2017; Whiteley, Fitzpatrick, Funk, & Tallmon, 2015; see Table 1 for definitions of terminologies related…”