Hafner M S, Nadler S A
Museum of Zoology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 70803.
Nature. 1988 Mar 17;332(6161):258-9. doi: 10.1038/332258a0.
The close correspondence often observed between the taxonomy of parasites and their hosts has led to Fahrenholz's rule, which postulates that parasites and their hosts speciate in synchrony. This leads to the prediction that phylogenetic trees of parasites and their hosts should be topologically identical. We report here a test of this prediction which involves the construction of phylogenetic trees for rodents and their ectoparasites using protein electrophoretic data. We find a high degree of concordance in the branching patterns of the trees which suggests that there is a history of cospeciation in this host-parasite assemblage. In several cases where the branching patterns were identical in the host and parasite phylogenies, the branch lengths were also very similar which, given the assumptions of molecular clock theory, strongly suggests that the speciation of these hosts and ectoparasites was roughly contemporaneous and causally related.
寄生虫分类与其宿主分类之间常被观察到的紧密对应关系催生了法伦霍尔茨法则，该法则假定寄生虫及其宿主同步物种形成。这进而预测寄生虫及其宿主的系统发育树在拓扑结构上应该是相同的。我们在此报告对这一预测的一项检验，该检验涉及利用蛋白质电泳数据构建啮齿动物及其体外寄生虫的系统发育树。我们发现这些树的分支模式高度一致，这表明在这个宿主 - 寄生虫组合中存在共物种形成的历史。在宿主和寄生虫系统发育中分支模式相同的几个案例中，分支长度也非常相似，鉴于分子钟理论的假设，这强烈表明这些宿主和体外寄生虫的物种形成大致是同时期的且存在因果关系。
