Commensal associations and benthic habitats shape macroevolution of the bivalve clade Galeommatoidea.

ABSTRACT: The great diversity of marine life has been shaped by the interplay between abiotic and biotic factors. Among different biotic interactions, symbiosis is an important yet less studied phenomenon. Here, we tested how symbiotic associations affected marine diversification, using the bivalve superfamily Galeommatoidea as a study system. This superfamily contains large numbers of obligate commensal as well as free-living species and is therefore amenable to comparative approaches. We constructed a global molecular phylogeny of Galeommatoidea and compared macroevolutionary patterns between free-living and commensal lineages. Our analyses inferred that commensalism/sediment-dwelling is likely to be the ancestral condition of Galeommatoidea and that secondary invasions of hard-bottom habitats lin

SUBMITTER: Li J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4947893 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature