Abstract
The genus Scotophilus contains 21 currently recognized species ranging throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. Among the 13 species recognized from continental Africa, systematic relationships remain poorly understood. Taxonomic uncertainty regarding names, suggestions of polytypic species complexes, and undescribed cryptic diversity all contribute to the current confusion. To gain insights into the systematics of this group, we inferred single locus and multi-locus phylogenies and conducted lineage delimitation analyses using seven unlinked genes for specimens from across Africa. Recent collections from Kenya allowed us to carry out population-level analyses for the diverse assemblage of East African Scotophilus. Multi-locus coalescent delimitation methods indicated strong support for three recently named lineages thought to be restricted to Kenya and Tanzania; it also uncovered two new distinctive lineages at present known only from Kenya. Subsequent taxonomic assessments that integrate these genetic data with phenotypic, distributional, and/or ecological traits are needed to establish these lineages as valid species. Nevertheless, as many as 15 Scotophilus species may occur in continental Africa, 10 of these in Kenya alone. Our analysis highlights the importance of population-level surveys for the detection of cryptic diversity in understudied regions such as the Afrotropics.
Highlights
Species constitute fundamental ecological and historical units in biological systems (Coyne and Orr, 2004)
The Bayesian (BI) and maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenetic estimates recovered very similar topologies; the BI gene tree is shown for the 233 sequence cyt-b alignment of 20 Scotophilus species/clades (Figure 1; individual gene trees for the 31 sequence cyt-b BI and ML analyses are shown in Figure 1, Supplemental Material)
For continental African Scotophilus, our analysis revealed two major geographic haplogroups: (a) a Kenya + Ethiopia + Yemendistributed clade that includes S. andrewreborii, clade 1, clade 2, S. cf. ejetai, and S. ejetai; and (b) an Eastern + Southern African distributed clade that includes S. livingstonii, S. trujilloi, and clades 3–6 (Figure 1)
Summary
Species constitute fundamental ecological and historical units in biological systems (Coyne and Orr, 2004). Accurate determination of species limits is critical for effective assessments of ecosystems services (Gascon et al, 2015), biodiversity hotspots (Mittermeier et al, 2011), and as units in community ecological and macroecological studies (Loreau et al, 2001). Species Limits in African House Bats (Hortal et al, 2015). These knowledge gaps in species-level taxonomy, the so-called Linnean shortfall, are prevalent in tropical species (e.g., Hughes et al, 2017); they characterize recently diverged and morphologically conservative clades where cryptic species are present (Fišer et al, 2018) and incomplete lineage sorting is expected due to recency of common ancestry (Hudson and Coyne, 2002). Care must be taken in applying these methods and understanding their limitations
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