Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Department of Biology, California State University Dominguez Hills, Carson, CA, USA.
Mol Ecol. 2020 Aug;29(16):2954-2956. doi: 10.1111/mec.15577. Epub 2020 Aug 17.
In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Yamasaki et al. (2020) use genetic data from extensive sampling of Rhinogobius goby fish across the Ryukyu Archipelago in Japan to demonstrate the parallel speciation of a freshwater form from an ancestral amphidromous form. They then show that ecosystem size strongly predicts the probability of speciation between the two forms across islands. In doing so, this study connects population-level processes (microevolution) to broad-scale biodiversity patterns (macroevolution), an important but understudied link in evolutionary biology. Moving forward, we can build on this research to (a) more directly determine how geographic, ecological and historical factors influence the different stages of the speciation process, and (b) understand whether mechanisms inferred from insular radiations extend to those on continents, where both demographic histories and environmental regimes are likely more complex.
在本期《分子生态学》中，Yamasaki 等人（2020）利用对日本琉球群岛上广泛采集的 Rhinolophus 蝙蝠的遗传数据，证明了淡水形式与祖先洄游形式的平行物种形成。然后，他们表明生态系统的大小强烈预测了两种形式在岛屿之间发生物种形成的可能性。通过这样做，这项研究将种群水平的过程（微观进化）与广泛的生物多样性模式（宏观进化）联系起来，这是进化生物学中一个重要但研究不足的环节。展望未来，我们可以在此研究的基础上：（a）更直接地确定地理、生态和历史因素如何影响物种形成过程的不同阶段；（b）了解从岛屿辐射中推断出的机制是否扩展到那些在大陆上的机制，因为在大陆上，人口历史和环境状况可能更为复杂。
