Speciation articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phylogenomic analysis of 7,923 angiosperm species using a standardized set of 353 nuclear genes produced an angiosperm tree of life dated with 200 fossil calibrations, providing key insights into evolutionary relationships and diversification.

    • Alexandre R. Zuntini
    • , Tom Carruthers
    •  & William J. Baker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Genomic studies of Heliconius butterflies provide evidence that Heliconius elevatus is a hybrid species, and that its speciation was driven by introgression of traits from Heliconius melpomene into the other parent, an ancestor of Heliconius pardalinus.

    • Neil Rosser
    • , Fernando Seixas
    •  & Kanchon K. Dasmahapatra

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Analysis of naturally hybridizing swordtail fish species reveals a mitonuclear genetic incompatibility among three genes that encode components of mitochondrial respiratory complex I, providing insights into the emergence of hybrid incompatibilities and reproductive barriers.

    • Benjamin M. Moran
    • , Cheyenne Y. Payne
    •  & Molly Schumer

  • Article |

    Dire wolves split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago and originated in the New World isolated from the ancestors of grey wolves and coyotes, which evolved in Eurasia and colonized North America only relatively recently.

    • Angela R. Perri
    • , Kieren J. Mitchell
    •  & Laurent A. F. Frantz

  • Article |

    A yeast clonal descendant of an ancient hybridization event is identified and sheds light on the early evolution of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Alpechin lineage and its abundant Saccharomyces paradoxus introgressions.

    • Melania D’Angiolo
    • , Matteo De Chiara
    •  & Gianni Liti

  • Article |

    Analyses of the genomes of cichlid species reveal that the combination of ecological opportunity, sexual selection and exceptional genomic potential is the key to understanding explosive adaptive radiation in cichlids.

    • Matthew D. McGee
    • , Samuel R. Borstein
    •  & Ole Seehausen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative provides a robust phylogenomic framework for examining green plant evolution that comprises the transcriptomes and genomes of diverse species of green plants.

    • James H. Leebens-Mack
    • , Michael S. Barker
    •  & Gane Ka-Shu Wong

  • Letter |

    Tadpoles of strawberry poison frogs (Oophaga pumilio) are shown to imprint on adult coloration, affecting both male aggression biases and female preferences and setting the stage for speciation by sexual selection.

    • Yusan Yang
    • , Maria R. Servedio
    •  & Corinne L. Richards-Zawacki

  • Letter |

    Contrary to previous hypotheses, high-latitude fish lineages form new species at much faster rates than their tropical counterparts especially in geographical regions that are characterized by low surface temperatures and high endemism.

    • Daniel L. Rabosky
    • , Jonathan Chang
    •  & Michael E. Alfaro

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    WebComparing the whole genome sequence of Apostasia shenzhenica with transcriptome and genome data from five orchid subfamilies permits the reconstruction of an ancestral gene toolkit, providing insight into orchid origins, evolution and diversification.

    • Guo-Qiang Zhang
    • , Ke-Wei Liu
    •  & Zhong-Jian Liu

  • Letter |

    On marine islands, most species are good dispersers and most niches are filled by immigration with little adaptive radiation; speciation increases over time, associated with the arrival of weak dispersers that randomly establish isolated populations.

    • Hudson T. Pinheiro
    • , Giacomo Bernardi
    •  & Luiz A. Rocha

  • Letter |

    A study of more than 2,000 bird species shows that diversity in bill shape expands towards extreme morphologies early in avian evolution in a series of major jumps, before switching to a second phase in which bills repeatedly evolve similar shapes by subdividing increasingly tight regions of already occupied niche space.

    • Christopher R. Cooney
    • , Jen A. Bright
    •  & Gavin H. Thomas

  • Letter |

    Relatively rapid changes in island area, isolation and connectivity observed since the Last Glacial Maximum have had measurable effects on present-day biodiversity, with formerly larger and less well connected islands having a greater number of endemic species.

    • Patrick Weigelt
    • , Manuel Jonas Steinbauer
    •  & Holger Kreft

  • Letter |

    A contemporary test of the theory of island biogeography, in which species richness is determined by an island’s area and isolation, shows that geographic area is still a good positive predictor of species richness, but that geographic isolation as a negative predictor has been replaced by economic isolation.

    • Matthew R. Helmus
    • , D. Luke Mahler
    •  & Jonathan B. Losos

  • Letter |

    Diversification of Neotropical birds is not directly linked to the Andean uplift, the major landscape change of the Neogene period; instead, most diversification is post-Neogene and species diversity is dependent on how long lineages have persisted in the landscape and how easily they disperse.

    • Brian Tilston Smith
    • , John E. McCormack
    •  & Robb T. Brumfield

  • Letter |

    The formation of a new species can occur by an asexual mechanism by transfer of entire nuclear genomes between plant cells as shown by the creation of a new allopolyploid plant from parental herbaceous and woody plant species, this mechanism is a potential new tool for crop improvement.

    • Ignacia Fuentes
    • , Sandra Stegemann
    •  & Ralph Bock

  • Article |

    Traits responsible for recent niche divergence between sympatric threespine stickleback species are subjected to forward genetic analysis; additive variation at several loci across the genome accounts for most of the genetic basis of ecological divergence, with a further role for epistatic interactions that disadvantage hybrids.

    • Matthew E. Arnegard
    • , Matthew D. McGee
    •  & Dolph Schluter

  • Letter |

    Two species may be fully reproductively isolated at the point they meet, but be connected by continuous gene flow by a longer route around the back of a geographical barrier; such a ring species complex exists for the greenish warbler, and genomics shows that there have been several historical breaks in gene flow along the continuum, as well as some introgression between the end forms.

    • Miguel Alcaide
    • , Elizabeth S. C. Scordato
    •  & Darren E. Irwin

  • Letter
    | Open Access

    The results of sequencing the collared flycatcher genome, and re-sequencing population samples from this species and its sister species, the pied flycatcher, reveal the existence of areas of high sequence divergence compared to background levels, and suggest that complex repeat structures may drive species divergence and that sex chromosomes and autosomes are at different stages of speciation.

    • Hans Ellegren
    • , Linnéa Smeds
    •  & Jochen B. W. Wolf

  • Letter |

    The motor driving cells during chemotaxis is very sensitive to levels of CheY-P, a signalling protein; counter-intuitively, the motor is tuned to the cells’ output of CheY-P by adjusting the number of CheY-P receptors in the motor, thereby increasing or decreasing the motor’s sensitivity to CheY-P.

    • Junhua Yuan
    • , Richard W. Branch
    •  & Howard C. Berg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A reference genome sequence for threespine sticklebacks, and re-sequencing of 20 additional world-wide populations, reveals loci used repeatedly during vertebrate evolution; multiple chromosome inversions contribute to marine-freshwater divergence, and regulatory variants predominate over coding variants in this classic example of adaptive evolution in natural environments.

    • Felicity C. Jones
    • , Manfred G. Grabherr
    •  & David M. Kingsley

  • Letter |

    Adaptive radiation of Mesozoic-era multituberculate mammals began at least 20 million years before the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and continued across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary—probably as a result of dietary expansion towards herbivory during the ecological rise of angiosperms—and is supported by increases in generic richness and disparity in dental complexity and body size.

    • Gregory P. Wilson
    • , Alistair R. Evans
    •  & Jukka Jernvall

  • Article |

    Historical and contemporary data of whitefish radiations from pre-alpine European lakes and reconstruction of changes in whitefish genetic species differentiation through time show that species diversity may have evolved in response to ecological opportunity, and that eutrophication, by diminishing this opportunity, has driven extinctions through speciation reversal and demographic decline.

    • P. Vonlanthen
    • , D. Bittner
    •  & O. Seehausen

  • News & Views |

    An electrifying evolutionary radiation has evidently occurred among elephant fish in Africa's Ivindo basin. An implication is that open niches for communication can result in species diversification.

    • Manuel Leal
    •  & Jonathan B. Losos

  • News & Views |

    Speciation can occur even when the incipient species coexist and can interbreed. An extensive analysis of two fruitfly strains suggests that many genomic regions contribute to speciation in such cases.

    • Erin S. Kelleher
    •  & Daniel A. Barbash

  • Letter |

    What agents of selection shape creatures in the wild? The answer for the brown anole lizard seems to be competition with its fellows, rather than predation from without. Bird or snake predators were included or excluded across six Caribbean islands that ranged from low to high population densities of lizards. Although the presence of predators altered lizard behaviour, it was increases in lizard population density that altered the lizard's phenotype, favouring larger size, longer legs and increased stamina for running.

    • Ryan Calsbeek
    •  & Robert M. Cox

  • News & Views |

    According to an innovative exercise in 'morphospace analysis', modern fish owe their stunning diversity in part to an ecological cleaning of the slate by the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.

    • Michael Alfaro
    •  & Francesco Santini

  • Letter |

    A new genus and species is described from fragmentary remains of a reptile from the mid–Triassic of Tanzania. The finding clarifies the relationships among the silesaurs. It is among the earliest known ornithodirans (dinosaurs plus pterosaurs), and demonstrates that silesaurs were not two-legged carnivores, as expected, but larger and more herbivorous. Furthermore, the find shows that we still know very little about the earliest stages of dinosaur and pterosaur evolution.

    • Sterling J. Nesbitt
    • , Christian A. Sidor
    •  & Linda A. Tsuji

  • News & Views |

    Biologists have assumed that natural selection shapes larger patterns of evolution through interactions such as competition and predation. These patterns may instead be determined by rare, stochastic speciation.

    • Michael J. Benton

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