Slowly dispersing neotenic beetles can speciate on a penny coin and generate space-limited diversity in the tropical mountains.

Abstract excerpt

We demonstrate the controversial origin of a biological species within an area of a few kilometres in the absence of physical barriers. We employed nuclear rRNA/mitochondrial and genome-wide SNP approaches to infer relationships of four species of net-winged beetles characterised by female neoteny. Three species are distributed at low elevations and a single population colonised a 40 km(2) highland plateau and...

Topics

• Animals
• Biological Evolution
• Coleoptera
• Ecosystem
• Male
• Phylogeny
• Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
• Sequence Analysis, DNA
• Species Specificity
• Tropical Climate