workshop summary: Atlantic fishes as a model for the study of biogeography and phylogeograhy

ISSN 1948‐6596 news and update workshop summary Atlantic fishes as a model for the study of biogeography and phylogeograhy Workshop on the biogeography and phylogeography of Atlantic fishes – Lisbon, Portugal, 26‐27 November 2011 I am not all that fond of the folklore and mystique that surrounds famous scientists, yet I often won‐ der how meetings used to be run in the old days. The 1911 Solvay Physics meeting with Marie Cu‐ rie, Albert Einstein, and Max Plank must have been quite something. The 1952 Royaumont meeting with Jim Watson, Jacques Monod, Fran‐ cois Jacob, and Sydney Brenner would have been its Natural Sciences equivalent. Besides the pres‐ ence of such icons and luminaries, the essence of the meetings was to genuinely exchange ideas and discuss science. Funding, publications, impact factors, and job advertising were not at the fore‐ front of the agendas, as they unfortunately are now. How much time do we spend trying to figure out which talk we are going to miss because of concurrent sessions? How often does a session chair need to cut short an interesting discussion because of conflicting schedules? The recent Workshop on the biogeography and phylogeogra‐ phy of Atlantic fishes organized in Lisbon, Portu‐ gal, by Vitor Almada, Rita Castilho, and Andre Levy was a pleasure to attend because it gave the par‐ ticipants full opportunity to discuss the science, a precious commodity these days. Participants would interrupt speakers when points needed to be clarified, talks did not have a preset time limit and discussions were simply as long as needed. If just for that, the meeting was not to be missed. The biogeography and phylogeography of Atlantic marine organisms share the same issues, pitfalls and successes as for any other region of the world. They also have their own peculiarities that make the region uniquely interesting. Two talks focused on the general issues of biogeogra‐ phy and phylogeography. W. Stewart Grant and Cliff Cunningham addressed the issues of molecu‐ lar clock calibrations, loss of signal, and signifi‐ cance of ancestral polymorphisms. Both borrowed from examples of phylogeographies from the north Pacific and the north Atlantic. Grant com‐ pared them, arguing that some significant loss of signal occurred during the last glacial maximum, resulting in potentially major misinterpretation of molecular clock data. Cunningham underscored other important drawbacks, first by showing the biasing effects of extinctions followed by secon‐ dary invasions and later by pointing to a seldom considered problem generated by the presence of ancestral polymorphisms. Generally used diver‐ gence based methods of calibrating molecular clocks are vulnerable to such problems, an issue that may be solved by different approaches, such as one proposed recently by Crandall et al. (2011), where population expansions are used as calibra‐ tion points. Two talks, by Vitor Almada and Sergio Floeter, provided new comprehensive background information on the biogeography of Lusitanian‐ Macaronesian and Atlantic fishes, respectively. Almada provided some original insights on the relative contribution of boreal and tropical faunas, and the role of potential refugia during glacial pe‐ riods. The Lusitanian province being a unique en‐ tity that is not a simple meeting point of adjacent provinces. A thorough review of the literature showed that Macaronesia is clearly understudied compared to its biogeographic neighbours. Al‐ mada also presented an interesting meta‐analysis of studies on population structure in fishes that span the Atlantic‐Mediterranean and Atlantic‐ North Sea transitions. More studies showed struc‐ ture in the former transition (81%) than the latter (60%), yet Almada argued that the lack of struc‐ ture in many studies is an important result, be‐ cause it is likely due to a direct effect of oceanic climate variability. Floeter presented a compre‐ hensive review of the biogeographic situation of the Atlantic using state‐of‐the‐art analysis of mul‐ tiple phylogenetic approaches based on a large number of fish species. The main biogeographic barriers, represented by the Amazon outflow, the frontiers of biogeography 3.4, 2012 — © 2012 the authors; journal compilation © 2012 The International Biogeography Society