Single origin of a pan-Pacific bird group and upstream colonization of Australasia

Abstract

Oceanic islands have long served as natural laboratories for understanding the diversification of life. In particular, the many thousands of islands spanning the tropical Pacific support an unparalleled array of terrestrial communities whose patterns of diversity contributed fundamental insights to the development of classical speciation and biogeographic theory. Much of this work is founded on an assumption derived from traditional taxonomic approaches, namely that faunas on these widely separated archipelagos stem from a simple one-way, downstream flow of colonists from continents to islands. Here we show, with the use of molecular phylogenetic data from one of the original bird families used to justify this assumption, that a diverse array of endemic island genera and species are the product of a single radiation that diversified across all major Pacific archipelagos in a non-stepping-stone fashion, and recently recolonized continental areas. The geographic scope and lineage-specific approach of this study reveal evolutionary patterns long obscured by traditional taxonomic surveys and indicate that widely dispersed archipelagos can be sources of biological diversity.