Species tree estimation and the historical biogeography of heroine cichlids.

Heroine cichlids are major components of the fish faunas in both Central America and the Caribbean. To examine the evolutionary patterns of how cichlids colonized both of these regions, we reconstructed the phylogenetic relationships among 23 cichlid lineages. We used three phylogenetically novel nuclear markers (Dystropin b, Myomesin1, and Wnt7b) in combination with sequence data from seven other gene regions (Nd2, Rag1, Enc1, Sreb2, Ptr, Plagl2, and Zic1) to elucidate the species tree of these cichlids. The species examined represent major heroine lineages in South America, Central America, and the Greater Antilles. The individual gene trees of these groups were topologically quite discordant. Therefore, we combined the genetic partitions and inferred the species tree using both concatenation and a coalescent-based Bayesian method. The two resulting phylogenetic topologies were largely concordant but differed in two fundamental ways. First, more nodes in the concatenated tree were supported with substantial or 100% Bayesian posterior support than in the coalescent-based tree. Second, there was a minor, but biogeographically critical, topological difference between the concatenated and coalescent-based trees. Nevertheless, both analyses recovered topologies consistent with the Greater Antillean heroines being phylogenetically nested within the largely Central American heroine radiation. This study suggests that reconstructions of cichlid phylogeny and historical biogeography should account for the vagaries of individual gene histories.