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"Contrasting adaptive and non-adaptive radiations in Indo-Pacific ""rats"": testing alternative evolutionary models for a hyperdiverse region"

Periodic Report Summary 1 - CANARIP-RAT (Contrasting adaptive and non-adaptive radiations in Indo-Pacific "rats": testing alternative evolutionary models for a hyperdiverse region)

I stopped my Marie-Curie IOF grant two years before the expected deadline (August 2016) as I recently obtained an assistant professor permanent position at the University Montpellier 2. Thanks to this fellowship and the acquired experience I succeed to obtain a permanent job in Europe, which is one of the expected goals of the Marie-Curie fellowship. I developed a logo for the project and plan to build a website in the course of the next two years. I started my new contract and thanks to my experience in the J. Losos laboratory in Cambridge, I developed a teaching on adaptive radiation at the university Montpellier that I already started to teach in November 2014.

As a result of my new employment, I will present hereafter my periodic and final report, which will be a modification of my mid-term report. As a result of my early termination, I will not have time to do all the expected work concerning my Marie-Curie proposal.

1) Results and conclusions

Overall, my project has progress beyond expectations after only one year of Marie-Curie fellowship. Being into the start of the second year of the grant, I have published a series of significant contributions and I followed the goals set out quite nicely. There will be a number of high impact publications coming out over the next few months and I am currently engaged in work covering all aspects of my objectives. Below, I briefly summarize the objectives of my Marie Curie proposal followed by the current status.

Objective (O1): Generating a new biological model to contrast adaptive and non-adaptive radiation theories
a. Indo-Pacific Murinae Systematics and Species Richness
b. Indo-Pacific Murinae Functional Diversity.

1) Building on previous work and ongoing collaborations, many new DNA sequences has been produced using next generation sequencing methodologies. This has resulted in the construction of a well-resolved robust phylogeny of the Indo-pacific rodents [6-7]. Currently a complete genus level molecular phylogeny has been produced and a paper is in the process of being written up.
An island biogeography paper on hutia rodents was recently finalized and published [1,6-7], as was a collaborative study on biogeography and adaptive radiation of Pittasoma birds [2,3-5]. I was invited by researcher from Cambridge to write a book chapter on rodent evolution during my stay that will be publish through the course of the next year. These studies related to objective 1 and 2, have all shed new important light over island biogeography and the build-up of diversity in island systems, which is more than I could have hoped for when I set out.

1a and 1b). The main outcome of this first year is the acquisition of a large morphological database for Indo-Pacific rodents. During 6 month I have collected data through several museum in the US and thanks to some collaborations two another museums. I build a morphological data for 95% of the rodent diversity; I started working on this aspect of the research in an adaptive radiation context (see objective 2 and 3). I already started the analyses and I was recently invited at the Smithsonian and at the Victoria Museum to develop this database, discuss projects with recognized researcher of rodent biology (Kristofer Helgen and Kevin Rowe). These collaborations will allow me to bring back a good research network to Europe for my upcoming employment at University Montpellier 2.

Objective (O2): Exploring exceptional diversifications in both idiosyncratic and uncharacteristic Indo-Pacific murine lineages

As mentioned above, I have started work on morphological and phylogenetical diversity. My morphological database is at early stage of analyses, and although some preliminary results exist (see following figures), this work still needs some conceptual development before the final analyses can be performed.

My analyses will provide a new framework for the adaptive radiation and non-adaptive radiation within the Indo-Pacific archipelago. To show some preliminary results I attached a first figure (Figure 1) describing the morphological space for Indo-Pacific rodents. The colors represent the different archipelagos: blue = Sulawesi, red = Philippines, Green = Australo-Papua, pink = Asia. The links are the phylogenetic relationships between species. The adaptive radiation species represent very Long Branch compared to most of the non-adaptive ones. The comparison between these lineages will shed new insights on the diversification of morphologically diverse and non-diverse taxa like expected by Objective 2. I am currently drafting a first paper based on these results in order to define for the first time the adaptive radiation of Indo-Pacific rodents. I will acknowledge the Marie-Curie IOF as well as both institutes in Cambridge and Paris-Saclay that were responsible for housing me as postdoctoral fellowship.


Objective (O3): Linking community ecology to adaptive and non-adaptive radiation theories

Recently published papers on biogeography and community build-up have taken this field of study a significant step forward. The work on adaptive radiation and community ecology of rodent is expected to add an additional dimension to this work described under objective 3.

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