Journal
AMERICAN NATURALIST
Volume 185, Issue 3, Pages 433-442Publisher
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/679662
Keywords
allopolyploidy; deep hybridization; divergence-time dating; reproductive isolation; speciation; species selection
Categories
Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada
- NSERC)
- NSERC
- National Science Foundation [DEB-1110767]
- Duke Biology Department
- Duke University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies graduate student field research grant
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A fern from the French PyreneesxCystocarpium roskamianumis a recently formed intergeneric hybrid between parental lineages that diverged from each other approximately 60 million years ago (mya; 95% highest posterior density: 40.2-76.2 mya). This is an extraordinarily deep hybridization event, roughly akin to an elephant hybridizing with a manatee or a human with a lemur. In the context of other reported deep hybrids, this finding suggests that populations of ferns, and other plants with abiotically mediated fertilization, may evolve reproductive incompatibilities more slowly, perhaps because they lack many of the premating isolation mechanisms that characterize most other groups of organisms. This conclusion implies that major features of Earth's biodiversitysuch as the relatively small number of species of ferns compared to those of angiospermsmay be, in part, an indirect by-product of this slower speciation clock rather than a direct consequence of adaptive innovations by the more diverse lineages.
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