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. 2012;7(1):e30043.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0030043. Epub 2012 Jan 9.

Is evolution of blind mole rats determined by climate oscillations?

Yarin Hadid  1 , Attila Németh, Sagi Snir, Tomáš Pavlíček, Gábor Csorba, Miklós Kázmér, Agnes Major, Sergey Mezhzherin, Mikhail Rusin, Yüksel Coşkun, Eviatar Nevo
Affiliations

Is evolution of blind mole rats determined by climate oscillations?

Yarin Hadid et al. PLoS One. 2012.

Abstract

The concept of climate variability facilitating adaptive radiation supported by the "Court Jester" hypothesis is disputed by the "Red Queen" one, but the prevalence of one or the other might be scale-dependent. We report on a detailed, comprehensive phylo-geographic study on the ∼4 kb mtDNA sequence in underground blind mole rats of the family Spalacidae (or subfamily Spalacinae) from the East Mediterranean steppes. Our study aimed at testing the presence of periodicities in branching patterns on a constructed phylogenetic tree and at searching for congruence between branching events, tectonic history and paleoclimates. In contrast to the strong support for the majority of the branching events on the tree, the absence of support in a few instances indicates that network-like evolution could exist in spalacids. In our tree, robust support was given, in concordance with paleontological data, for the separation of spalacids from muroid rodents during the first half of the Miocene when open, grass-dominated habitats were established. Marine barriers formed between Anatolia and the Balkans could have facilitated the separation of the lineage "Spalax" from the lineage "Nannospalax" and of the clade "leucodon" from the clade "xanthodon". The separation of the clade "ehrenbergi" occurred during the late stages of the tectonically induced uplift of the Anatolian high plateaus and mountains, whereas the separation of the clade "vasvarii" took place when the rapidly uplifting Taurus mountain range prevented the Mediterranean rainfalls from reaching the Central Anatolian Plateau. The separation of Spalax antiquus and S. graecus occurred when the southeastern Carpathians were uplifted. Despite the role played by tectonic events, branching events that show periodicity corresponding to 400-kyr and 100-kyr eccentricity bands illuminate the important role of orbital fluctuations on adaptive radiation in spalacids. At the given scale, our results supports the "Court Jester" hypothesis over the "Red Queen" one.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree showing the relationship between 41 samples of blind mole rats plus one outgroup Acomys cahirinus.
Numerical values represent bootstrap values out of 1000 reiterations. The nodes marked by capital letters represent internal and external branches supported by bootstrap values higher than 95%. The clades are referred to by Roman numerals: I “Spalax”, II “vasvarii”, III “leucodon”, IV “xanthodon” and V “ehrenbergi” (a). Taxonomic nomenclature is according to Table S1; Neighbour-net graph showing an agreement in the major splits with the ML tree (b).
Figure 2
Figure 2. Maximum likelihood phylogram of blind mole rates constructed by means of PhyMl.
Branch values indicate the rate of heterogeneity (a). Neighbor-net graph showing relationship between clades “vasvarii”, “leucodon” and “xanthodon”. It shows that the clades are significantly separated (indicated by 100% bootstrap), but that among them some speciation-related processes such as hybridization or introgression could take place (b).
Figure 3
Figure 3. Sampling points covering the distribution area of blind mole rats ranging from the Carpathian Basin to the East Mediterranean.
For numerical symbols see Table S1.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Periodogram of branching events in the clades “ehrenbergi” (a) and “leucodon” (b).
Frequency a = 0.1 is significant (P<0.05). Periodicity in eccentricity during the last 3 My with marked branching events in blind mole rats.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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