Title: Community Phylogenetic Diversity and Species Coexistence
I am not a biological people (but ecological) going to give myself a challenge so I choose the totally new topic (for me)— phylogenetics just because it’s so cool and so first-cutting for me.
Human has been studying their environment for a long time, for the community, which might know the structure and then the function first, that means we already have ideas about what it looks like and how it works from large scale based on human’s own vision (because we don’t know how it is from other species’ vision). However, we get more powerful technique ( finds? Theory? ) today that is phylogenetics, it provides another eyes to human to look the actual dynamics of the world (I just got the idea from Matt’s lecture yesterday). In biology, people use molecular traits or morphological data matrics to study evolution of speciation, population and community—phylogenetics. And then the tree of life was made based on phylogenic evident of species (or population, community), the all kind of trees tell us the one information that is how diversification of species (population, community) on the earth look like in the past and present, and how these living things are interacting with time.
How the diversity in tropical forest look like? And what are the mechanisms of species coexistence? We’ve been discussed a lot in our last student roundtable… and everyone of you have very good explaining, but today I am going to say something more about mine. There is another interesting new discipline called multiagent modeling who these are doing the research think the world is bottom-up, that means every tiny substantial interaction make the complexity, e.g. every man cut down the tree then it’s will be a big loss if there are 1000 people go to cut down treeS, which shows any accumulation from the individuals’ behavior and interaction can make a completely complex world. I was wondering if we go down to the small scale, molecular level, to look for what is the dynamics of large scale world, e.g. species coexistence… that would be very cool (that what is phylogenetics telling us), maybe human and any species on the earth just puppets of the molecular world, which means what we did just follow the orders of molecular of ourselves… this is totally a bottom-up world?
Then we can explain how the world should look like? Why these species coexistence why not others from phylogenetics? Sure, every scientific question is not easy to get answer and phylogenetics also is not an exception (and I am not it can answer all of questions too, because human ourselves has such short life span and limited technique as far.). And some wide men did the kind of works; they use phylogenetic methods to test how species coexistence—phylodiversity dependent seeding mortality and size structure, which we discussed” the Janzen- Connell effect” host-specific pests reduce recruitment near reproductive adults. 2006, Webb et al. use phylogenetic relationship among organisms—can move beyond ranks such as family and genus—to use phylogenetic distance among the taxa to get the conclusions that a seedling survives increases if surrounding plants are not closely related to it in a small scale.
And we know the interaction between plants and animals on pollinators and seed dispersers mould earth’s biodiversity (from large scale, that what I mention— human’s vision).2007, Rezenda et al. use phylogenetic method to simulate coexitinctions, which was finding a answer for understanding of structure and fate of species-rich communities, because these kind of interaction are partially dependent on past evolutionary history, and cannot be exclusively explained by current ecological processes. 2004, Cavender-Bares use phylogenetic idea to test competitive exclusion of oak communities in North Central Florida, and found environmental filtering in oak communities does not lead to clustering of closely related species, which means co-occuring oak species are more phylogenetic distantly related than oaks which are phylogenetic overdispersion.
As far, people have already used lots of phylogenetic method to test the relationships in the large scale world, but how about the smaller scale? How the interaction between pathogen-host (is a biological agent that causes disease or illness to its host) on plant? Most of researches of pathogens were record but only on high economically value plant, 2007Gilbert used phylogenetic distance get the result that spread rate of disease on pathogen-host depend strongly on the phylogenetic structure of the community. And current regulatory approaches strongly underestimate the local risks of global movement of plant pathogens or their hosts.
From now on, phylogenetic approaches may provide more and more powerful evidence for supporting what we know about the large scale world from the phylogenetic network, through visualizing evolutionary relationships between sequences, genes, chromosomes, genomes, species, population, community… human’s curiosity has never stopped, so this may lead our to use totally new and powerful approaches to detect the world. Then maybe we can find out all of secrete of nature one day, e.g. how is the species coexistence in tropical forest…
Reference:
S.Joseph Wright (2002)Plant diversity in tropical forests: a review of mechanisms of species coexistence.Oecologia 130:1-14;
J.Cavender-Bares, D.D.acherly, D.A.Baum, F.A.Bazzaz (2004) Phylogenetic overdispersion in Floridian Oak Communities.The American Naturalist163: 823-843;
J. Cavender-Bares, A.Keen, B.Miles (2006)Phylogenetic structure of Floridian plant communities depends on taxonomic and spatial scale. Ecology87(7):S109-S122;
E.L.Rezende, J.E.Lavabre,P.R.Guimaraes Jr, P.Jardano, J.Bascompte(2007)Non-random coextinctions in phylogenetically structured mutualistic networks.Nature448:925-929;
C.O.Webb, G.S.Gilbert, M.J.Donoghue(2006)Phylodiversity-dependent seedling mortality, size structure, and disease in a Baonean rain forest. Ecology87(7):S123-S131;
Phylogenetics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetics
Pathogen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogen
Phylogenetic network, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_network
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