Old Taxa on Young Islands: A Critique of the Use of Island Age to Date Island-Endemic Clades and Calibrate Phylogenies

Heads, Michael

doi:10.1093/sysbio/syq075

Cited by 119 publications

(128 citation statements)

References 108 publications

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“…The most speciesrich province is centred on Indonesia and the Philippines ( figure 1a). The additional eight provinces, from west to east, are: the Persian Gulf, Africa-India, Australia, Japan-Vietnam, Of the 290 sites, 59 were not of sufficient similarity to any other to be placed within a province (figure 1a). The reef areas encompassed by both the Red Sea and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were very large, comparable to several of the provinces identified elsewhere (see the electronic supplementary material, figure S1).…”

Section: Results (A) Biogeographical Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…On some islands, taxa are older than the geological age of those islands, indicating that these taxa originated elsewhere and later colonized the younger islands. For example, two islands along the track within the Africa-India province are 2-3 million years old, but host an endemic plant family that molecular dating has estimated as 52 million years old [59]. During the process of migration along stepping stones, species with strong dispersal and/or establishment abilities may be favoured, observable as selective colonization.…”

Section: (A) Historical Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Faunal breaks and species composition of Indo-Pacific corals: the role of plate tectonics, environment and habitat distribution

et al. 2013

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Species richness gradients are ubiquitous in nature, but the mechanisms that generate and maintain these patterns at macroecological scales remain unresolved. We use a new approach that focuses on overlapping geographical ranges of species to reveal that Indo-Pacific corals are assembled within 11 distinct faunal provinces. Province limits are characterized by co-occurrence of multiple species range boundaries. Unexpectedly, these faunal breaks are poorly predicted by contemporary environmental conditions and the present-day distribution of habitat. Instead, faunal breaks show striking concordance with geological features (tectonic plates and mantle plume tracks). The depth range over which a species occurs, its larval development rate and genus age are important determinants of the likelihood that species will straddle faunal breaks. Our findings indicate that historical processes, habitat heterogeneity and species colonization ability account for more of the present-day biogeographical patterns of corals than explanations based on the contemporary distribution of reefs or environmental conditions.

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Section: Results (A) Biogeographical Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: (A) Historical Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Faunal breaks and species composition of Indo-Pacific corals: the role of plate tectonics, environment and habitat distribution

et al. 2013

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“…This is apparent from his extension of the age of many nodes to depths far beyond those considered reasonable by both palaeontologists and neontologists who specialise on the taxa in question (e.g. Heads 2005Heads , 2010Heads , 2012c. Heads' claim amounts to saying that the cumulative, and massive volume of palaeontological work provides no clues (other than minimum ages) for when any group appeared on the planet.…”

Section: Mischaracterising the Choice And Use Of Calibrationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Heads is among a minority of biogeographers who believe, on the one hand, that LDD is not an important process, and, on the other hand, that all or nearly all disjunctions must be explained by some form of vicariance (Heads 1985(Heads , 2005(Heads , 2009(Heads , 2010(Heads , 2011(Heads , 2012a(Heads , 2014b. In Heads' case, these beliefs derive directly from the panbiogeography of Croizat (1958Croizat ( , 1962, and, especially, the claim that an objective examination of distribution patterns reveals the dominance of the fragmentation and conglomeration of areas as biogeographic processes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jurassic primates, immobile ducks and other oddities: a reply to Heads’ review of The Monkey’s Voyage

Queiroz

2016

Aust. Systematic Bot.

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Abstract. In The Monkey's Voyage, I focused on the issue of disjunct distributions, and, in particular, on the burgeoning support from molecular-dating studies for long-distance dispersal over vicariance as the most reasonable explanation for many (but by no means all) distributions broken up by oceans. Michael Heads' assessment of the book is founded on his long-standing belief, following Croizat, that long-distance dispersal is an insignificant process and, therefore, that disjunctions are virtually always attributable to vicariance. In holding to these notions, Heads offered a series of unsound arguments. In particular, to preserve an 'all-vicariance' perspective, he presented a distorted view of the nature of long-distance dispersal, misrepresented current applications of fossil calibrations in molecular-dating studies, ignored methodological biases in such studies that often favour vicariance hypotheses, repeatedly invoked irrelevant geological reconstructions, and, most strikingly, showed a cavalier approach to evolutionary timelines by pushing the origins of many groups back to unreasonably ancient ages. The result was a succession of implausible histories for particular taxa and areas, including the notions that the Hawaiian biota is almost entirely derived from ancient (often Mesozoic) central Pacific metapopulations, that the disjunctions of extremely mobile organisms such as ducks rarely, if ever, result from long-distance dispersal, and that primates were widespread 120 million years before their first appearance in the fossil record. In contrast to Heads' perspective, a central message of The Monkey's Voyage is that explanations for disjunct distributions should be evaluated on the basis of diverse kinds of evidence, without strong a priori assumptions about the relative likelihoods of long-distance dispersal and vicariance.

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“…However, for taxa with a poor fossil record, using geological calibrations as a maximum age bound is an occasional practice in molecular dating analyses, particularly in groups that have diversified on oceanic islands (e.g., Austin et al 2004). This approach has been widely criticized, mainly because of the implicit assumption that divergence events do not predate island ages, that is, the hypothesis that the endemic clade must have diversified in situ (Emerson 2007;Forest 2009;Heads 2011). This critical assumption is not always verified, and using hard constraints based on island age may strongly impact divergence time estimates, but very few studies have tested this impact so far (e.g., Mello and Schrago 2012).…”

Section: Diversification Of Dombeyoideae (Malvaceae) In the Mascarenementioning

confidence: 99%

Diversification of Dombeyoideae (Malvaceae) in the Mascarenes: Old Taxa on Young Islands?

Péchon

Dai

Zhang

et al. 2015

International Journal of Plant Sciences

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Editor: Félix ForestPremise of research. The patterns of diversification of Mascarene taxa remain largely unknown in comparison to other insular systems. Traditional interpretations of insular radiations often assume that endemic taxa radiated after the origin of the insular habitats on which they were established. The Dombeyoideae (Malvaceae) sublineage endemic to Mauritius and Réunion in the Mascarenes is an ideal model to test for the signature of insular diversification.Methodology. We combined molecular sequences for a dense sample of Mascarene dombeyoids together with African, Malagasy, and Asian outgroup species. We estimated divergence times based on two calibration schemes (including or excluding geological calibration). Comparative phylogenetic methods were used to study the diversification rates and the evolution of the floral disparity in the Mascarene clade.Pivotal results. Excluding geological constraints resulted in drastically older age estimates than when we included such calibrations. Diversification patterns suggest a decrease of diversification rates through time. The low morphological disparity indicates an early partitioning of floral characters.Conclusions. The lineage diversification and the morphological disparity are consistent with traditional scenarios of insular radiation. However, the Mascarene clade is older than Réunion and Mauritius, suggesting the onset of radiation before the formation of the archipelago. The diversification might have been driven by geographical opportunity rather than ecological opportunity.

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Old Taxa on Young Islands: A Critique of the Use of Island Age to Date Island-Endemic Clades and Calibrate Phylogenies

Cited by 119 publications

References 108 publications

Faunal breaks and species composition of Indo-Pacific corals: the role of plate tectonics, environment and habitat distribution

Faunal breaks and species composition of Indo-Pacific corals: the role of plate tectonics, environment and habitat distribution

Jurassic primates, immobile ducks and other oddities: a reply to Heads’ review of The Monkey’s Voyage

Diversification of Dombeyoideae (Malvaceae) in the Mascarenes: Old Taxa on Young Islands?

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