Origin of the Laurentian Great Lakes fish fauna through upward adaptive radiation cascade prior to the Last Glacial Maximum.

ABSTRACT: The evolutionary histories of adaptive radiations can be marked by dramatic demographic fluctuations. However, the demographic histories of ecologically-linked co-diversifying lineages remain understudied. The Laurentian Great Lakes provide a unique system of two such radiations that are dispersed across depth gradients with a predator-prey relationship. We show that the North American Coregonus species complex ("ciscoes") radiated rapidly prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (80-90 kya), a globally warm period, followed by rapid expansion in population size. Similar patterns of demographic expansion were observed in the predator species, Lake Charr (Salvelinus namaycush), following a brief time lag, which we hypothesize was driven by predator-prey dynamics. Diversification of prey into deep

SUBMITTER: Backenstose NJC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11319351 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature