Quantitative genetics of body size evolution on islands: an individual-based simulation approach
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2019-10
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Resumo
According to the island rule, small-bodied vertebrateswill tend to evolve larger
body size on islands, whereas the opposite happens to large-bodied species.
This controversial pattern has been studied at the macroecological and biogeographical
scales, but new developments in quantitative evolutionary genetics
now allow studying the island rule from a mechanistic perspective. Here,
we develop a simulation approach based on an individual-based model to
model body size change on islands as a progressive adaptation to amoving optimum,
determined by density-dependent population dynamics.We applied the
model to evaluate body size differentiation in the pigmy extinct hominin Homo
floresiensis, showing that dwarfing may have occurred in only about 360 generations
(95% CI ranging from 150 to 675 generations). This result agrees with
reports suggesting rapid dwarfing of large mammals on islands, as well as
with the recent discovery that small-sized hominins lived in Flores as early as
700 kyr ago. Our simulations illustrate the power of analysing ecological and
evolutionary patterns from an explicit quantitative genetics perspective.
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Adaptation, Body size, Dwarfing, Island rule, Homo
Citação
DINIZ-FILHO, José Alexandre F. et al. Quantitative genetics of body size evolution on islands: an individual-based simulation approach. Biology Letters, London, v. 15, e 20190481, Oct. 2019.