Lifestyle and Ice: The Relationship between Ecological Specialization and Response to Pleistocene Climate Change.

ABSTRACT: Major climatic changes in the Pleistocene had significant effects on marine organisms and the environments in which they lived. The presence of divergent patterns of demographic history even among phylogenetically closely-related species sharing climatic changes raises questions as to the respective influence of species-specific traits on population structure. In this work we tested whether the lifestyle of Antarctic notothenioid benthic and pelagic fish species from the Southern Ocean influenced the concerted population response to Pleistocene climatic fluctuations. This was done by a comparative analysis of sequence variation at the cyt b and S7 loci in nine newly sequenced and four re-analysed species. We found that all species underwent more or less intensive changes in population size

SUBMITTER: Kasparova E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4636791 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature