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Objective The Caribbean is an important global biodiversity hotspot. Adaptive radiations there lead to many speciation events within a limited period and hence are particularly prominent biodiversity generators. A prime example are freshwater fish of the genus Limia, endemic to the Greater Antilles. Within Hispaniola, nine species have been described from a single isolated site, Lake Miragoâne, pointing towards extraordinary sympatric speciation. This study examines the evolutionary history of the Limia species in Lake Miragoâne, relative to their congeners throughout the Caribbean. Results For 12 Limia species, we obtained almost complete sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene, a well-established marker for lower-level taxonomic relationships. We included sequences of six further Limia species from GenBank (total N  = 18 species). Our phylogenies are in concordance with other published phylogenies of Limia. There is strong support that the species found in Lake Miragoâne in Haiti are monophyletic, confirming a recent local radiation. Within Lake Miragoâne, speciation is likely extremely recent, leading to incomplete lineage sorting in the mtDNA. Future studies using multiple unlinked genetic markers are needed to disentangle the relationships within the Lake Miragoâne clade.

Feeding is relevant to every aspect of animal life and is tightly linked to the ecological niche a species occupies. In concordance with the enormous diversity found in teleost fishes, feeding specialisations are also abundant in this group. One example for this is the order Cyprinodontiformes. This is the most diverse and speciose order of freshwater fishes within the Atherinomorphae. More than 1350 species are known in this order, which are distributed in temperate and tropical regions of the world usually inhabiting shallow freshwater environments or coastal brackish waters (Malabarba & Malabarba, 2020). The Cyprinodontiformes contain approximately

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