Dynamic rivers contributed to Amazon's rich bird diversity
One of the most contentious questions in evolutionary biology is, how did the Amazon become so rich in species? A new study focused on birds examines how the movements of rivers in the Amazon have contributed to that area's exceptional biological diversity. The research team, led by the American Museum of Natural History, found that as small river systems change over time, they spur the evolution of new species.
To investigate how the movement of rivers across the landscape has influenced the accumulation of bird species in the Amazon, the researchers sequenced the genomes of six species of Amazonian birds. However, because these rivers move around the landscape at different time scales, their movements can have varying outcomes for bird species: when river rearrangements occur quickly, populations of birds on each side can merge before they've had time to differentiate; when river changes happen slowly, species have a longer time to diverge from one another; and when rivers change at intermediate rates, bird populations diverge and then join back together and co-occur when a river moves.
"Though we know Amazonian biodiversity is unmatched by any other terrestrial ecosystem, we demonstrated that its species richness may be greatly underestimated even in well-studied groups such as birds," Musher said."Our results corroborate those of other studies that have reported fine-scale patterns of diversity across the southern Amazon basin -- a region threatened by rapid and ongoing deforestation -- yet this diversity is generally unrecognized.
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