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MBE Advance Access originally published online on July 25, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2007 24(9):2069-2080; doi:10.1093/molbev/msm138
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Research Articles

Gene Flow between Species of Lake Victoria Haplochromine Fishes

Irene E. Samonte*,1, Yoko Satta{dagger},1,2, Akie Sato{ddagger}, Herbert Tichy§, Naoyuki Takahata{dagger} and Jan Klein||

* Biology Department and Center for Natural Sciences and Environmental Research (CENSER), College of Science, De La Salle University-Manila, Manila, Philippines
{dagger} Department of Biosystems Science, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan
{ddagger} Department of Anatomy, Tsurumi University, Yokohama, Japan
§ Tübingen, Germany
|| Department of Biology, Pennsylvania State University

E-mail: satta{at}soken.ac.jp.

Accepted for publication June 28, 2007.

The haplochromine cichlid fishes of Lake Victoria (LV), East Africa, are a textbook example of adaptive radiation—a rapid divergence of multiple morphologically distinguishable forms from a few founding lineages. The forms are generally believed to constitute a "flock" of several hundred reproductively isolated species in a dozen or so genera. This belief has, until now, not been subjected to a test, however. Here, we compare genetic variation at 11 loci in 10 haplochromine populations of 6 different species. Although the genetic diversity in the populations is quite high, using a variety of statistical tests, we find no evidence of genetic differentiation among the populations of LV haplochromines. On genetic distance trees, populations of the same species intermingle with those of different species. At the molecular level, the species are indistinguishable from one another. Genetic comparisons with closely related species in 2 crater lakes indicate that the species within LV continue exchanging genes. These observations have important implications for phylogenetic reconstruction. The approach used in this study is applicable to other instances of adaptive radiation.

Key Words: hybridization • gene flow • cichlid fishes • Lake Victoria • adaptive radiation • ancestral polymorphism

1 These authors contributed equally to this paper, one (I.E.S.) by generating the data and the other (Y.S.) by analyzing the data statistically.

2 Present address: Department of Biosystems Science, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan.

William Martin, Associate Editor


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