Life Sciences Commons^™

Species delimitation using mitochondrial sequences aims to identify species as morphological expertise and biodiversity both decline. Species delimitation in animals relies completely or in part on 2 critera: genetic distance and reciprocal monophyly. Using coalescent simulations of populations experiencing continuous and interrupted gene flow we show that these commonly applied criteria incur both high false-positive and high false-negative error rates in species delimitation when dispersal is sex-biased, as it is in most mammals. The combination of distance- and topology-based critera will incur false-positive error rates well above 5% when ancestral effective population sizes are large and when population structure has …

The chiropteran family Myzopodidae is endemic to Madagascar and is characterized by several unique morphologies, such as sessile adhesive discs on the thumb and sole. A new species, Myzopoda schliemanni, was recently described from western Madagascar that is morphologically distinct and geographically disjunct from the eastern species, M. aurita, the only other member of this family. Geographic variation within Myzopoda has only recently been studied at the morphological level and has never been addressed at the genetic level. We used a combination of phylogenetic, coalescent, and population genetic analyses to characterize the speciation history of Myzopoda and to clarify current …