Evolutionary history of Philippine birds.

Evolutionary history of Philippine birds. With some 7,000 islands lying adjacent to a continental shelf, aknown geologic history, and high levels of endemism, the Philippineislands are of great interest to biogeography BiogeographyA synthetic discipline that describes the distributions of living and fossil species of plants and animals across the Earth's surface as consequences of ecological and evolutionary processes. . Throughout history, themajority of the Philippines have remained isolated, so overwater Since being founded in 1979, Chris May and his staff at Overwater guitars (now based in Carlisle, England) have produced bass guitars regarded by many to be among the finest available. colonization must explain the presence of these organisms. Researchershave proposed hypotheses of colonization and diversification processesfor 80 years, yet these have not been tested in an explicitly historicalmanner.I sequenced mitochondrial DNA from seven species of birds that aredistributed on all of the major islands of the Philippines This is a list of islands of the Philippines. There are 7,107 islands, of which about 4,000 are inhabited. They are clustered into the island groups of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. . From thesedata, I constructed Bayesian phylogenies of relationships, and usedthese to test phylogenetic phy��lo��ge��net��icadj.1. Of or relating to phylogeny or phylogenetics.2. Relating to or based on evolutionary development or history. predictions for each hypothesizedcolonization route. My results demonstrate unique colonization anddiversification patterns for each of the seven taxa taxa:see taxon. . Examining existingliterature on Philippine organisms as well as my own data shows someevidence for each proposed colonization route, but the greatest supportis for the two routes from Borneo. Many taxa exhibit multiplecolonization events, using several of these routes. As each organismcolonizes a new island, gene flow halts and differentiation occurs,regardless of its Pleistocene history. These data also show that specieswidespread throughout the Philippines possess surprisingly high levelsof genetic differentiation among and within islands, suggesting thatmodern taxonomic divisions in these birds underestimate the truebiodiversity of this imperiled fauna. Ph.D. thesis (Zoology, Genetics), University of Minnesota (body, education) University of Minnesota - The home of Gopher.http://umn.edu/.Address: Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. .