Project Details
Projekt
The lacustrine species flocks in the ancient lakes of Sulawesi (Indonesia): Linking organismic diversification and key environmental events
Applicants
Dr. Fabian Herder; Dr. Thomas von Rintelen
Subject Area
Palaeontology
Evolution, Anthropology
Evolution, Anthropology
Term
from 2014 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 252622269
Ancient lakes harbour some of most spectacular evolutionary radiations or species flocks on earth and their study has resulted in important insights into general patterns of speciation and radiation. In Southeast Asia, theMalili lakes on the Indonesian island Sulawesi form a hotspot of aquatic biodiversity. Parallel adaptive radiations of molluscs, crustaceans, and fishes, among others, offer an outstanding opportunity to comparediversification patterns in organisms differing in fundamental biological properties within the same environmental setting. The ICDP drilling of the largest lake in the system, Lake Towuti, which has just been completed successfully, provides an excellent opportunity to boost our understanding of diversification processes in this system, by enabling the linking of biological data gained from studying extant species with the variation in environmental variables over the last c. 650,000 plus years. This will allow us to test the role of external drivers of diversification in all major endemic species flocks in the Malili lake system.The drilling will yield reliable information on the age of Lake Towuti, the timing of past lake level fluctuations, changes in hydrological connections between the Malili Lakes, and the general environmental backdrop to the evolution of their biodiversity. These data will ultimately allow us to assess the influence of these variables on biological colonization events, periods of introgressive hybridization, habitat stability, and geographic modes of species divergence (sympatric, allopatric) in Lake Towuti and the entire system. In this project we will generate the baseline data for testing the influence of major climatic and environmental events, by conducting comprehensive metaanalyses of the large existing phylogenetic datasets for the major species flocks in the Malili lakes in order to identify major events such as lake colonization, speciation bursts, habitat shifts, orhybridization in the evolution of these groups, including their temporal framework by applying state-of-the-art molecular dating techniques. The second project phase will focus on the generation of a nuclear gene dataset using next generation sequencing. These data, which will be comparable across all taxa, will allow to test the results gained so far in the project based on mitochondrial genes. This multi-marker approach will permit to draw more reliable conclusions from the genetic data. The identification and timing of crucial events in the major taxa of the Malili lakes will enable us to test whether they match significant changes in environmental variables at a later stage in the project.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
