MicrobeMan
Community Member
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2020
- Messages
- 41
- Reaction score
- 42
Hi Everyone!
I was doing a bit of a deep dive into phylogenetic diversity papers since I have a lot of time on my hands and can't get back to lab work for a while and I stumbled upon a paper I thought might be fun to share with the SPS enthusiasts here on Reef2Reef. The paper is by Faith and Richards and essentially looks at potential coral conservation based on phylogenetic diversity and where high risk species fall on the evolutionary tree.
Anyways, the paper has this awesome figure that I think many of you might appreciate. It's mostly just pretty neat to see which species of Acropora are most closely related to one another and which ones are endangered in the wild. If you're not familiar with phylogenetic trees, the more horizontal distance (following the lines) between the species, the more genetically different they are. What this means is that A. valida is more closely related to A. tortuosa than A. gemmifera even though valida and gemmifera are closer vertically on this tree.
Some cool things to note are that A. youngi (the green slimer) and A. tenuis are really off in their own little subclade toawrds the bottom whereas a lot of other common acros in the hobby like millepora, valida, etc are bunched up near the top. In addition, the far bottom clade with all the red boxes is where Caribbean Acros lie (they're certainly in trouble).
I have to admit, I'm not fantastic at explaining it without gesticulating but if you're interested, there's a wealth of info on the web and this figure is from Faith and Richards, 2012 published in the journal Biology.
I just though this was cool and hopefully some of you enjoy it too!
I was doing a bit of a deep dive into phylogenetic diversity papers since I have a lot of time on my hands and can't get back to lab work for a while and I stumbled upon a paper I thought might be fun to share with the SPS enthusiasts here on Reef2Reef. The paper is by Faith and Richards and essentially looks at potential coral conservation based on phylogenetic diversity and where high risk species fall on the evolutionary tree.
Anyways, the paper has this awesome figure that I think many of you might appreciate. It's mostly just pretty neat to see which species of Acropora are most closely related to one another and which ones are endangered in the wild. If you're not familiar with phylogenetic trees, the more horizontal distance (following the lines) between the species, the more genetically different they are. What this means is that A. valida is more closely related to A. tortuosa than A. gemmifera even though valida and gemmifera are closer vertically on this tree.
Some cool things to note are that A. youngi (the green slimer) and A. tenuis are really off in their own little subclade toawrds the bottom whereas a lot of other common acros in the hobby like millepora, valida, etc are bunched up near the top. In addition, the far bottom clade with all the red boxes is where Caribbean Acros lie (they're certainly in trouble).
I have to admit, I'm not fantastic at explaining it without gesticulating but if you're interested, there's a wealth of info on the web and this figure is from Faith and Richards, 2012 published in the journal Biology.
I just though this was cool and hopefully some of you enjoy it too!
