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MBE Advance Access published online on July 25, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution, 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 Article

Gene Flow Between Species of Lake Victoria Haplochromine Fishes

Irene E. Samonte1, Yoko Satta2, Akie Sato3, Herbert Tichy4, Naoyuki Takahata2 and Jan Klein5

1 Biology Department and Center for Natural Sciences and Environmental Research (CENSER), College of Science, De La Salle University-Manila, 2401 Taft Avenue, Manila, Philippines
2 Department of Biosystems Science, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Hayama, Kanagawa 240-0193, Japan
3 Department of Anatomy, Tsurumi University, Yokohama 230-8501, Japan
4 Tübingen
5 Department of Biology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Corresponding author: Yoko Satta, Department of Biosystems Science, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Hayama, Kanagawa 240-0193, Japan, TEL/FAX 81-046-858-1574/1544, e-mail satta{at}soken.ac.jp

Received for publication June 21, 2007. 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 ten haplochromine populations of six 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 two crater lakes indicate that the species within LV continue exchanging genes. These observations have important implications for phylogenetic reconstruction. The approach used in this stucy is applicable to other instances of adaptive radiation.

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


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