Hung Chih-Ming, Drovetski Sergei V, Zink Robert M
Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
Division of Birds, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA.
Mol Ecol. 2017 Jul;26(14):3775-3784. doi: 10.1111/mec.14152. Epub 2017 Jun 2.
Organismal traits such as ecological specialization and migratory behaviour may affect colonization potential, population persistence and degree of isolation, factors that determine the composition and genetic structure of communities. However, studies focusing on community assembly rarely consider these factors jointly. We sequenced 16 nuclear genes and one mitochondrial gene from Caucasian and European populations of 30 forest-dwelling avian species that represent diverse ecological (specialist-generalist) and behavioural (migratory-resident) backgrounds. We tested the effects of organismal traits on population divergence and community assembly in the Caucasus forest, a continental mountain island setting. We found that (i) there is no concordance in divergence times between the Caucasus forest bird populations and their European counterparts, (ii) habitat specialists tend to be more divergent than generalists and (iii) residents tend to be more divergent than migrants. Thus, specialists and residents contribute to the high level of endemism of Caucasus forest avifauna more than do generalists and migrants. Patterns of genetic differentiation are better explained by differences in effective population sizes, an often overlooked factor in comparative studies of phylogeography and speciation, than by divergence times or levels of gene flow. Our results suggest that the Caucasus forest avifauna was assembled through time via dispersal and/or multiple vicariant events, rather than originating simultaneously via a single isolation event. Our study is one of the first multilocus, multispecies analyses revealing how ecological and migratory traits impact the evolutionary history of community formation on a continental island.
诸如生态特化和迁徙行为等生物体特征可能会影响定殖潜力、种群持久性和隔离程度，这些因素决定了群落的组成和遗传结构。然而，专注于群落组装的研究很少同时考虑这些因素。我们对30种栖息于森林的鸟类的高加索和欧洲种群的16个核基因和1个线粒体基因进行了测序，这些鸟类代表了不同的生态（特化种-泛化种）和行为（迁徙-留居）背景。我们在一个大陆性山地岛屿环境——高加索森林中，测试了生物体特征对种群分化和群落组装的影响。我们发现：（i）高加索森林鸟类种群与其欧洲对应种群的分化时间不一致；（ii）栖息地特化种往往比泛化种分化程度更高；（iii）留居种往往比迁徙种分化程度更高。因此，与泛化种和迁徙种相比，特化种和留居种对高加索森林鸟类特有性的高水平贡献更大。遗传分化模式更好地由有效种群大小的差异来解释，有效种群大小是系统发育地理学和物种形成比较研究中一个经常被忽视的因素，而不是由分化时间或基因流水平来解释。我们的结果表明，高加索森林鸟类群落是通过扩散和/或多次隔离事件随时间组装而成的，而不是通过单一隔离事件同时起源的。我们的研究是首批多基因座、多物种分析之一，揭示了生态和迁徙特征如何影响一个大陆岛屿上群落形成的进化历史。
