A bottom up approach to understand the origins of an island super-radiation

Abstract

Species radiations provide fertile ground for the investigation of the drivers of speciation on oceanic islands, and have been the focus of many molecular phylogenetic studies. This top down phylogenetic approach has been very informative to understand the timing and geography of speciation (intra-island versus inter-island), but has typically been less informative regarding the detail of speciation itself. However, diversification is a dynamic process, with both speciation and extinction playing out over the full geological timescale of island ontogeny. Thus a bottom up approach, where the focus is on broad geographical sampling of closely related species complexes within radiations, can provide a more direct approach to the study of the speciation process. In this presentation I will outline how we are taking such a genome-focused bottom-up approach within the genus Laparocerus, the largest arthropod radiation on the Canary Islands.