Evolution 2019: How Many Species of Anolis distichus?
Anolis distichus is a highly variable species from Hispaniola. It’s especially variable in its dewlap color, ranging from white, to orange, to red. In the past, A. distichus has been broken up into 16 subspecies based on its dewlap variation! In order to get a better handle on how justified these subspecies are, undergraduate Tanner Myers, working with Pietro Longo Hollanda de Mello and Rich Glor, from the University of Kansas, presented a poster titled Identifying species when boundaries are blurred.
Myers collected and compared genetic and morphological data from populations of A. distichus from across Hispaniola. If dewlap color was acting as a sexual signal limiting gene flow between populations, the authors expected their genetic and morphological data to also partition along with dewlap color. They found this to not be the case! The authors found support for only 6 candidate species based on their genetic data. When the authors looked at their morphological data (linear body, limb, and head measurements), to see if these 6 candidate species had any morphological divergence, they found no strong pattern. Using a PCA, their morphological principal component plots highly overlapped. In the end, the authors suggest that Anolis distichus may represent a highly variable group in in the early stages of speciation, but at this point, they do not support any taxonomic revisions of the species.
Tanner Myers will be starting graduate school with Jamie Oaks at Auburn University in the fall.
Source: http://www.anoleannals.org/2019/06/23/evolution-2019-how-many-species-of-anolis-distichus/
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