Padrões de evolução do nicho climático e de diversificação em anuros neotropicais

• Autor(a) principal: Braga, Pedro Henrique Pereira
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/12008
• topic: Anuros; Desenvolvimento; Nicho climático; Conservação de nicho; Especiação; Métodos filogenéticos comparativos; Climatic niche; Anurans; Development; Niche conservatism; Speciation; Phylogenetic comparative methods; CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::ECOLOGIA

Understanding how important species traits are distributed across evolution is a major task for evolutionary ecologists and comparative biologists. Here, we addressed evolutionary questions about the niche evolution and diversification among anuran species. We performed analyses of the climatic niche evolution and diversification rates of direct and indirect development Neotropical anurans with the use of multivariate description of the species’ climatic niche and modern phylogenetic comparative methods. We tested the predictions that due to high physiological dependence to water, (i) frogs with biphasic life cycles (indirect development; free-larval form present) tend to retain their ecological niche characteristics across evolution (i.e., phylogenetic niche conservatism) and (ii) the climatic niche of direct development anurans evolved faster than the climatic niche of anurans with indirect development. We also hypothesized that, because of the role of niche conservatism in promoting allopatric speciation, indirect development anurans would also have higher diversification rates than direct development anurans. By including a high number of sampled species, we showed that there are no differences in their actual macroecological climatic niche. However, although niche position is similar between groups, indirect development anurans showed phylogenetic conservatism in their climatic niche, whilst direct development anurans evolved their niche according to the null expectation. Our assessments of diversification rates indicate that there is a correlation between terrestrial development and decreased diversification in anurans in a more general way and that faster speciation and reduced extinction in the Neotropics contribute to higher diversification in indirect development anurans. We consider that the insertion of larval characteristics can, therefore, imply in obstruction in the evolution of the environmental niche of a clade. We also believe that the evolution to different niches set by the different environmental requirements (here, one terrestrial and other fully or semi aquatic) resulted in divergent adaptive peaks (fitness valleys and trade-offs between adaptation to different environments), to which both direct and indirect development anurans evolved to match.