review: phylogeny of flightless birdsjankowsk/bio413_2_010814.pdf · biogeographic line: a...

Resources for understanding phylogenies:

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_05

Image credit: Brown & Lomolino (1998) Biogeography 2nd ed. Sinauer Associates Inc., Sunderland, Mass.

Hadrath & Baker (2001) Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 268: 939-945 1

Review: Phylogeny of flightless birds

past present Time (my)




Turtles from Ascension island nesting colony are genetically identical to turtles from the Brazilian nesting colony. Green turtles must have dispersed to Ascension Island from Brazil very recently (e.g., within the last 10,000 years)

Bowen et al. (1992) Evolution 46(4):. 865-881

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mtDNA phylogeny

Review: Green sea turtles on Ascension Island

How can we rule out vicariance? Not only are turtles on Ascension Island similar to those in coastal Brazil Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has a fast rate of evolution... Given vicariance (evolution in isolation) we would expect island populations to be highly differentiated after 70 my

Bowen et al. (1992) Evolution 46(4):. 865-881

D

E

F

C

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mtDNA phylogeny

Review: Green sea turtles on Ascension Island

History of Biogeography

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age 25 age 55 age 80 age 90

Image credit: http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/altphoto.htm

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)

The men who knew islands...

Darwin Day - February 12, 2014

History of Biogeography

Biogeography is a synthetic discipline, with elements of ecology, evolution, geography, climatology, genetics, and phylogenetics (to name a few)

We’ll cover the following:

• historical roots of the discipline

• major players in early development

• evolution from a descriptive endeavor to a rigorous scientific discipline

And will focus on three time periods:

1. 1700 to 1900 (age of exploration)

2. 1900 to 1960 (age of integration)

3. 1960 to present (age of maturity) 6

Early interest in Biogeography

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Humans have had a practical and intellectual interest in distribution of animals. Central themes of biogeography arose in late 1600’s Ships began traversing the globe for economic and political gain Many ships had naturalists on board who made extensive collections Collections began to show trends in species distributions and abundance

Image credit: http://deitchman.com/mcneillslides/units.php?

unit=%20Prehistoric%20Arts

1700 1800 1900 2000

Trends in Biogeography pre-1900

8 1700 1800 1900 2000

Classification of geographic regions based on biotas

Reconstruction of biotas - i.e. origin, diversity

Patterns in species diversity of different regions

Geographic variation in species traits (morphology, behaviour)

...but this was a long process, > 100 years Image credit:

http://deitchman.com/mcneillslides/units.php?unit=%20Prehistoric%20Arts

Biologists and naturalists of 18th Century largely driven by a calling to serve God

Inventory and collections began to threaten accounts in Genesis: How could Noah’s Ark fit all of these creatures? How large is 350 “cubits”? One of many discussions to come...

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Conflict with theology

Image credits http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-

countdown/2012/02/16/meet-pangolin-threatened-traditional-asian-medicine/

Image credits: http://www.onekind.org/be_inspired/animals_a_z/aardvark/ Image credits: http://freewallpaperspot.com/15-capybara-

wallpaper.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yo

ung_red_necked_wallaby.jpg

New collections and nomenclature

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Carl von Linnaeus (Swedish botanist, 1707-1778): Father of classical binomial nomenclature and taxonomy. Believed in immutability of species. Suggested world's biodiversity originated by dispersal from Mount Ararat in Turkey where Noah’s Ark was thought to have landed after biblical flood. First incidence of the idea that taxa have centers of origin

Image credit: www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html

Many groups are now known to have centers of origin, locations of highest diversity (e.g. Indo-west Pacific is the center of origin for marine fishes – diversity declines moving away from this center)

1700 1800 1900 2000

Challenges with collections

Specimens (dried “skins”) shipped back to Europe often arrived with missing parts

Linneaus named a specimen of this bird of paradise, which happened to be missing its feet, Paradisea apoda

But not unreasonable compared to other strange new discoveries – if there can be flightless birds with flimsy wings, why not a bird with no feet?

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Paradisea apoda

http://www.finerareprints.com/animals/histoire_naturelle/vol_histoire_nat_bird_5173.htm

The beginning of radical ideas

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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French naturalist, 1707-1788): Suggested in "Histoire Naturelle": (1) Earth must be much older than the biblical claim of 6000 yrs

(2) taxa changed through time, as did the Earth (i.e. there must be a connection between the geological and biological histories of earth)

Very radical ideas and > 100 years before Darwin

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1700 1800 1900 2000

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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French naturalist, 1707-1788): Hypothesized that the center of origin for earth’s biota was in the far north when climates were more benign. Biotas changed and diversified as they colonized southward into present day North America and Eurasia.

Buffon’s law (1st law of biogeography): environmentally similar but isolated regions have distinct species assemblages (with similar attributes)

1700 1800 1900 2000

The beginning of radical ideas

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Connecting climate with flora and fauna

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Alexander von Humboldt (German, 1769-1859): Extended Buffon's Law to plants and terrestrial animals Coined the term floristic belts and promoted the idea that plant distribution is determined by climate First to note the complementarity of South American and west African coastlines and that they may have been joined at one time (heavily ridiculed for such "fantasy" by peers)

http://www.macroevolution.net/alexander-von-humboldt.html

1700 1800 1900 2000

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Alexander von Humboldt (German, 1769-1859):

By Sten Porse (Image:Vegetation) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Connecting climate with flora and fauna

Fossils and increased notion of gradual change

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Charles Lyell (British geologist, 1797-1875): Breakthrough ideas in “Principles of Geology” (1830): Stratigraphic layers and fossils suggest the earth and its biota changed through time, changes were gradual and ongoing Earth must be much older than a few thousand years

http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/

Uniformitarianism: basic natural laws and processes have always acted on the earth, and understanding present geological processes is key to understanding the past.

1700 1800 1900 2000

Fossils and increased notion of gradual change

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Charles Lyell (British geologist, 1797-1875): Breakthrough ideas in “Principles of Geology” (1830): Both Darwin and Wallace took this book with them on their voyages.

1700 1800 1900 2000


Gradual change through natural selection

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Charles Darwin (British, 1809-1882): Influenced by Lyell’s work and made connection between the earth’s geological history and changes in biota as the result of geographic isolation and natural selection. Wrote “The Origin of Species” (1859) - proposed natural selection as a key factor in the origin of species and differences in species diversity and composition among geographic areas.


1700 1800 1900 2000

Second voyage of the Beagle

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Charles Darwin (British, 1809-1882):

27 December 1831 to 2 October 1836

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyage_of_the_Beagle.jpg

Dispersalists & Extensionists

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Charles Darwin (British, 1809-1882): Considered importance of long distance dispersal in establishing geographically isolated populations and subsequent divergence. Opposed by extensionists (including Lyell) who believed that land bridges explain occurrence of isolated populations.

http://galapagostour.us/Colonization_by_Organisms

Opposing paradigms to explain disjunct distributions or isolated taxa: Dispersalist: rare long-distance dispersal events establish isolated populations that then differentiate Extensionist: land bridges (now submerged) facilitated the extension of distributions between land-masses

Dispersalists & Extensionists

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Charles Darwin (British, 1809-1882): Considered importance of long distance dispersal in establishing geographically isolated populations and subsequent divergence. Opposed by extensionists (including Lyell) who believed that land bridges explain occurrence of isolated populations.

Opposing paradigms to explain disjunct distributions or isolated taxa: Dispersalist: rare long-distance dispersal events establish isolated populations that then differentiate Extensionist: land bridges (now submerged) facilitated the extension of distributions between land-masses

Biogeographic regions

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Phillip Sclater (British, 1829-1913): Made connection between low dispersal ability and the ability to reconstruct origin of a region's biota from current composition Developed first major classification scheme for earth’s biota based on distributions and composition of birds (described over 1,000 species), principally passerines

Biogeographic line: a geographic boundary that animals (or plants) tend not to cross. Some lines are more permeable that others, some taxa less constrained.

1700 1800 1900 2000

Elliot, D. G. "In memoriam". The Auk

1914:31(1)

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Phillip Sclater (British, 1829-1913): Proposed six regions in 1858, each with a distinct center of origin for respective regional faunas. Basic divisions are still recognized and used today: Nearctica (North America and parts of Mexico) Palearctica (Eurasia) Neotropical (tropical central America and S. America) Aethiopica (Africa) Indica (Indian subcontinent) Australiana (Australia)


1914:31(1)

1700 1800 1900 2000


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http://www.radford.edu/~swoodwar/CLASSES/GEOG235/zoogeog/zooprov.gif

1700 1800 1900 2000



1914:31(1)

Phillip Sclater (British, 1829-1913): Proposed six regions in 1858, each with a distinct center of origin for respective regional faunas. Basic divisions are still recognized and used today:

“The man who knew islands”

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Alfred R. Wallace (British, 1823-1913): More than any other, Wallace compiled observations on distributions, diversity, extinction, disjunctions, and climate effects on distribution into a series of major works all between 1869 and 1880: “The Malay Archipelago”, “The Geographical Distribution of Animals”, and “Island Life” Refined Sclater's regions so that concordance in distributions of distinct taxa substantiates the reality of those divisions and the processes generating them


1700 1800 1900 2000

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Alfred R. Wallace (British, 1823-1913): Famous for recognizing Wallace’s Line which separates fauna of southeast Asian origin from those of Australian origin.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/_0_0/history_16



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http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/3194/Biological-Realms.html



Alfred R. Wallace (British, 1823-1913):

Other Rules of Biogeography

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Several rules of biogeography stemmed from observations of geographical trends in species and their attributes The beginning of physiological biogeography where researchers conduct experiments to determine environmental and genetic determinants of latitudinal patterns.

Bergmann’s Rule (1847): Body size tends to increase with increasing latitude Allen’s Rule (1878): Species at higher latitudes tend to have shorter, smaller limbs than those at lower latitudes. Jordan’s Rule (1881): Fish species / populations at higher latitudes have more and smaller vertebrae than those from lower latitudes

1700 1800 1900 2000

Evolutionary Synthesis

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Classical Mendelian genetics, theoretical population genetics, systematics, and taxonomy unified into a comprehensive body of theory of evolutionary change – how factors such as genetic drift, mutation, and natural selection could drive evolutionary change

J.B.S. Haldane S. Wright R.A. Fisher

1700 1800 1900 2000

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T. Dobzhansky and E. Mayr promoted the importance of geographic isolation in the origin of species. "Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution“ – T. Dobzhansky

Evolutionary Synthesis

1700 1800 1900 2000

T. Dobzhansky E. Mayr

Four Key Developments after 1960

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1) Acceptance of the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics (based largely on ideas of Alfred Wegener) due to irrefutable evidence from Stratigraphy, Paleoclimatology, Paleontology, Marine geology, Paleomagnetism

http://geology12-8.wikispaces.com

http://www.unc.edu/depts/oceanweb/turtles/geomag.html

http://www.fossils.me.uk/html/pangea.html

1700 1800 1900 2000

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2) Phylogenetic systematics: the basic philosophy of reconstructing the historical and evolutionary relationships among taxa

Phylogeny: the evolutionary relationships between an ancestor taxa and all its known descendant taxa Phylogeography: an approach to biogeography that studies the geographic distributions of lineages within and among species


1700 1800 1900 2000

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Image credit: Brown & Lomolino (1998) Biogeography 2nd ed. Sinauer Associates Inc., Sunderland, Mass. Hadrath & Baker (2001) Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 268: 939-945


2) Phylogenetic systematics: the basic philosophy of reconstructing the historical and evolutionary relationships among taxa

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3) Ecological biogeography: contemporary interactions and species relationships are important in the determination of species range limits.

The Theory of Island Biogeography: MacArthur and Wilson (1963, 1967) proposed this theory to account for the observation that island size and species diversity are correlated.

# species

rate

small

large

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far


1700 1800 1900 2000

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4) Technological advances allow old hypotheses to be tested rigorously and expand the spatial scale of biogeographic inference: Computers, Satellites and remote sensing, Geophysics, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Molecular biology technology


http://science.nasa.gov/iSat/

Jetz et al. 2012

http://science.nasa.gov/iSat/

http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/google.com/science-2013-global-forest

References for this section:

Bowen, B.W., A.B. Meylan, J.P. Ross, C.J. Limpus, G.H. Balazs, & J.C. Avise (1992) Global population

structure and natural history of the green turtle (Chelonia mydas) in terms of matriarchal phylogeny Evolution 46: 865-881.

Brown, J.H. 1978. The theory of insular biogeography and the distribution of boreal birds and mammals. Great Basin Naturalist Memoirs 2: 209-227.

Haddrath, O., & A.J. Baker (2001) Complete mitochondrial DNA geonome sequences of extinct birds: ratite phylogenetics and the vicariance biogeography hypothesis Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 268: 939-945.

Jetz, W. G. H. Thomas, J. B. Joy, K. Hartmann & A. O. Mooers. 2012. The global diversity of birds in space and time. Nature 491: 444-448.

Lomolino, M.V., B.R. Riddle, R.J. Whittaker, & J.A. Brown. 2010b. Biogeography (4th ed.). Sinauer Associates, Inc., Sunderland, Mass.

MacArthur, R.H. and Wilson, E.O. 1967 The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.

Mayr, E. 1982. The growth of biological thought. The Belknap Press of Harvard University. (Good source for biographical sketches of individuals)

Quammen, D. 1996. The song of the dodo: island biogeography in an age of extinctions. Scribner, New York. (Great treatment of some the life and times of A.R. Wallace and some of the more recent personalities in biogeography)

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review: phylogeny of flightless birdsjankowsk/bio413_2_010814.pdf · biogeographic line: a...

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