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Climate change

Theses/Dissertations

2011

Clemson University

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Going All The Way: Phylogeography And Trans-Pacific Divergence Genetics Of Nucella Lima, Lisa Cox Aug 2011

Going All The Way: Phylogeography And Trans-Pacific Divergence Genetics Of Nucella Lima, Lisa Cox

All Theses

Fluctuating climate over the last 2 million years (MY) has repeatedly caused latitudinal shifts in species distributions, fueling the hypothesis that the glacial-interglacial dynamics of the Pleistocene could have driven regional genetic differentiation and potentially speciation. For species whose distributions spanned the entire North Pacific, regional extinction of northern populations during cooler glacial periods may have resulted in isolation and genetic differentiation of eastern and western populations. To test this hypothesis, I gathered genetic data from a rocky shore intertidal gastropod, Nucella lima, whose current (i.e. warm interglacial) distribution spans the entire North Pacific. Mitochondrial DNA sequences are genetically structured …