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with Prof. Dr. Oscar Puebla
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Date : Thursday November 2nd – 12h15
Location : Auditoire A – Génopode
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"The complete phylogeny of the hamlets supports a modular, genic view of rapid radiation"
How a lineage may rapidly diversify into a variety of species is still a largely unresolved question in evolutionary biology. Here, we present the complete phylogeny of the hamlets (Hypoplectrus spp., Serranidae), a group of reef fishes from the wider Caribbean that is characterized by an exceptionally high diversification rate. A total of 337 genomes from 21+ species and outgroups from 15 locations reveal a ~2 million-years-old split between three species from the southern Gulf of Mexico that harbor high levels of ancestral diversity (H. floridae, H. ecosur and H. atlahua) and the rest of the radiation. Nevertheless, these two major lineages are admixed and the whole-genome phylogeny is largely unresolved at the species level within both lineages. With the notable exception of one genomic region centered on the casz1 gene that tends to separate the species that have vertical bars from the ones that do not, none of the local phylogenies that we analyzed is even close to resolve the radiation at the species level. These results stand in stark contrast with the fact that the Hypoplectrus radiation is taxonomically well resolved, with clear phenotypic differences and strong behavioral reproductive isolation among species. They show that rapid diversification may unfold in a genomic backdrop that is largely dominated by introgression and incomplete linage sorting. The rapid diversification of the hamlets appears to result from different combinations of alleles at a few genomic regions that are linked to specific aspects of species differences (color pattern) and reproductive isolation (vision).
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O. Puebla conducted his undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Lausanne, with specialization in population biology and zoology. He then moved to the province of Quebec to pursue a MSc in oceanography on the population genetic structure of the snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio) at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans. This brought him to McGill University in Montreal where he conducted his PhD thesis on the population genetics of the hamlets (Hypoplectrus spp), a group of reef fishes from the wider Caribbean that is still the focus of his research. After his PhD he joined the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama where he stayed for a total of five years, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then as an Associate Scientist. He then landed a Junior Professorship in evolutionary genetics of marine fishes at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany. Since 2019 he is a permanent Workgroup Leader at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen and a Joint Professor at the University of Oldenburg (Germany). All his graduate and postdoctoral studies were funded through grants, fellowships and teaching. On the way he got married in Montreal, his first daughter was born in Panama and the second one in Kiel. He conducted dozens of scientific expeditions across the Caribbean, totalling >700 scientific dives.
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