IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| SimÆo, T.L.L. | |
| Avalia‡Æo de genes nucleares como marcadores filogen‚ticos em duas linhagens recentes de carn¡voros neotropicais | |
| 2011 Full Book | |
The Neotropical region holds approximately 30% of the current species diversity in the carnivoran families Felidae (subordem Feliformia) and Canidae (subordem Caniformia), which migrated to South America after the closure of the Panamanian Isthmus, _ca. _3 million years ago. Due to the recent speciation process that characterizes each of these groups, some aspects of their phylogenetic structure remain controversial, especially those related to the evolutionary relationships among species belonging to two lineages, the genus _Leopardus _(Felidae) and the genus _Lycalopex _(Canidae). The objective of the present study was to perform a comparative characterization of the evolutionary history of these genera, using sequences of multiple independent nuclear gene loci and multiple individuals per species to investigate the occurrence of genealogical discordance, as well as to infer a 'species tree' for each lineage using the program _*BEAST_. We observed both intra-specific and interspecific variation for all the surveyed segments. Genealogical discordance was identified among segments, highlighting the complexity of the task of reconstructing the phylogeny of such groups by employing nuclear markers. The estimated genealogies demonstrated that species were often not monophyletic, while there were several cases of inter-specific haplotype sharing. Nevertheless, the species tree reconstructed for _Leopardus _was highly resolved and supported, indicating that our data set contained sufficient genealogical information to retrieve this phylogeny. However, in the case of _Lycalopex_, most of the internal nodes received low support, indicating that a larger number of genes will likely be necessary to consistently resolve its phylogenetic structure using this type of approach. Overall, our results have empirically demonstrated the occurrence of genealogical discordance in both lineages, and illustrated the potential of multi-locus analyses to resolve phylogenies underlying recent diversification processes. |
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