Abstract:
Abstract
The Old World bat family Miniopteridae comprises only the genus Miniopterus,
which includes 20 currently recognized species from the Afrotropical realm and
15 species from Eurasia and Australasia. Since 2003, the number of recognized
Miniopterus species has grown from 19 to 35, with most newly described species
endemic to Madagascar and the Comoros Archipelago. We investigated genetic variation, phylogenetic relationships and clade membership in Miniopterus focusing on
Afrotropical taxa. We generated mitochondrial cytochrome‐b (cyt‐b) and nuclear intron data (five genes) from 352 vouchered individuals collected at 78 georeferenced
localities. Including 99 additional mitochondrial sequences from GenBank, we analysed a total of 25 recognized species. Mitochondrial genetic distances among cyt‐b‐
supported clades averaged 9.3%, representing as many as five undescribed species.
Multilocus coalescent delimitation strongly supported the genetic isolation of eight
of nine tested unnamed clades. A large number of sampled clades in sub‐Saharan
Africa are distributed wholly or partly in East Africa (nine of 13 clades), suggesting
that Miniopterus diversity has been grossly underestimated. Although 25 of 27 cyt‐b
and 23 of 25 nuclear gene tree lineages from the Afrotropics were strongly supported
as monophyletic, a majority of deep nodes were poorly resolved in phylogenetic
analyses. Long terminal branches subtending short backbone internodes in the phylogenetic analyses suggest a rapid radiation model of diversification. This hypothesis
needs to be tested using more phylogenetically informative data.
KEYWORDS
Afrotropics, Madagascar, Miniopterus, phylogenetics, species tree, taxonomy
