Members of the Muñoz Lab contributed to a new study published in Science Advances! The authors used a genome-scale dataset covering nearly 400 species of wrasses and parrotfishes (family Labridae) to reconstruct their evolutionary history. They found that these vibrant coral reef fishes rapidly diversified around 20-15 million years ago during the Miocene, a period of global climate stability. Rather than a single cause, the study shows that this burst of diversification resulted from multiple, independent events across the wrasse and parrotfish tree of life. These findings highlight the power of genomic data in revealing how Earth's biodiversity has developed, insights that are key to predicting how reef ecosystems respond to modern environmental change. The study was led by Yale EEB graduate student Chase Brownstein and includes contributions from Laura Alencar (Muñoz Lab), Edward Burress (former Muñoz Lab postdoc, now at the University of Alabama), and Prof. Martha Muñoz, among others. The study was supervised by Prof. Tom Near (Yale EEB). Check it out! https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu6149
RSS Feed