Re: Paper: Homoploid Hybrid Speciation in an Extreme Habitat

Regarding the extracted portion of article below (unsnipped):

This article raises a number of questions for me, among them:

1. Do the parent species (L. melissa and L. idas) appear in the Alpine
area that
was studied...? or the hybrid, only?

2. Is the mosaic genome of the hybrid species as consistent as is found
among
species not viewed as hybrid ones? Or does a variety of mosaic
constellations
occur among them?

3. Did the hybridization, which gave rise to this species (or this
in-progress
speciation) confer greater Alpine habitat-specific fitness upon the
hybrids.
such that neither parent species could live where the hybrids live;

4. Is the hybridization estimated to have occurred elsewhere, and enabled
only
the hybrids to colonize the Alpine habitat studied? Or is it
estimated that the
hybridization took place during times when the subject habitat had
milder
than average weather?

5. Do hybrids with the same two parent species abound in the areas where
the
parent species are adapted? And, if so, is the genome mosaic among
the hybrids
in that/or those geographic area(s) identical to that of the adapted
hybrids? Or
different? {If different, then that would help toward isolating
which gene
constellations may have worked together in the selective (adaptive)
process.}

g

"Robert Karl Stonjek" <rstonjek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:emk0f0$298i$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Originally published in Science Express on 30 November 2006
Science 22 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5807, pp. 1923 - 1925
DOI: 10.1126/science.1135875

Homoploid Hybrid Speciation in an Extreme Habitat
Zachariah Gompert, James A. Fordyce, Matthew L. Forister, Arthur M.
Shapiro,
Chris C. Nice

According to theory, homoploid hybrid speciation, which is hybrid
speciation
without a change in chromosome number, is facilitated by adaptation to a
novel or extreme habitat. Using molecular and ecological data, we found
that
the alpine-adapted butterflies in the genus Lycaeides are the product of
hybrid speciation. The alpine populations possess a mosaic genome derived
from both L. melissa and L. idas and are differentiated from and younger
than their putative parental species. As predicted, adaptive traits may
allow for persistence in the environmentally extreme alpine habitat and
reproductively isolate these populations from their parental species.

Source: Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/314/5807/1923

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek




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