Avian Evolution during the Pleistocene in North America
Editors
Masahiro Kato
Document Type
Chapter
Publication Date
2000
Publisher
Springer
Publisher Location
Japan
Book Title
The Biology of Biodiversity
First page number:
275
Last page number:
288
Abstract
Late Pleistocene glacial cycles (Wisconsinian, Illinoian) in North America are thought to have caused speciation in many songbirds. If true, such species pairs should have diverged little in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence owing to the short time span involved. We compared mitochondrial DNA sequences of the cytochrome b gene for 21 such pairs. Gamma-corrected Kimura two-parameter distances averaged 7.1%, which, across a range of potential calibrations, is much larger than expected on average for speciation events that occurred within the last 250,000 years. Hence, most species presumed by previous authors to be of very recent origins are in fact much older. To discover effects of Late Pleistocene glaciations, we examined the genetic architectures of present day species. Predictions from coalescence theory were examined in light of our expectation that most bird populations have undergone recent population expansions. We examined the few available continent-wide phylogeographic surveys, finding unstructured haplotype trees, geographic patterns of nucleotide diversity, mismatch distributions and plots of the number of lineages vs time, all consistent with recent population expansions as species recolonized deglaciated areas.
Keywords
Birds--Speciation; Molecular genetics; Phylogeography; Pleistocene; Songbirds
Controlled Subject
Birds--Speciation; Pleistocene Geologic Epoch; Songbirds
Disciplines
Biodiversity | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Genetics and Genomics | Ornithology
Language
English
Permissions
Copyright 2000, Springer-Verlag Tokyo. Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or use interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the chapter.
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Repository Citation
Zink, R. M.,
Klicka, J.
(2000).
Avian Evolution during the Pleistocene in North America. In Masahiro Kato,
275-288.
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