Derivation of the freshwater fish fauna of Central America revisited: Myers's hypothesis in the twenty‐first century

Abstract

Although attempts to understand Central American freshwater fish provincialism date to the 1960s, early efforts lacked the wealth of distributional data now available. Biogeographic work on Central American freshwater fishes has been largely descriptive and regional, and lacked a broader synthesis. Here we use parsimony analysis of endemicity (PAE) to elucidate faunistic relationships between major drainages and to delineate areas of endemism. We then perform a Brooks parsimony analysis (BPA) on the resulting areas. The PAE recovered a primary division between four Pacific and six Atlantic slope areas of endemism. In contrast, the BPA recovered two Central American geographic clades, one sharing a history with North America and the other with South America. Fish diversity is uneven across Central America, with greater diversity in areas adjacent to the more species‐rich regions of North and South America. In northern and nuclear Central America, the paucity of ostariophysan freshwater fishes such as catfishes and characins (groups that dominate adjacent regions) contrasts with high species richness of poeciliids and cichlids. Results of this study are consistent with Myer's hypothesis that poeciliids and cichlids dispersed to Northern or Nuclear Middle America early in the Cenozoic, long before the Plio‐Pleistocene rise of the Isthmus of Panama.

Biogeography of Amazonian fishes: deconstructing river basins as biogeographic units

“…Those are presently limited to PAE (Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity), CADE (Cladistic Analysis of Distributions and Endemism), BPA (Brooks Parsimony Analysis) and BPA 0 . Those four methods have been applied with some degree of success and their results have been shown to contain a reasonable degree of biogeographic coherence (Hubert, Renno, 2006;Ingenito, Buckup, 2007;Buckup, 2011;Lima, Ribeiro, 2011;Schaefer, 2011;Camelier, Zanata, 2014;Matamoros et al, 2015). The use of other methods such as 3-area analysis (Nelson, Ladiges, 1991), reconciled tree analysis (Page, 1994a,b), component analysis (Nelson, Platnick, 1981) and paralogy-free subtrees (Nelson, Ladiges, 1996) would be interesting in theory, but we found that software available for their implementation cannot be reliably applied to our database, which is probably one of the largest yet assembled for any biogeographic problem.…”

“…As usual in such searches as applied to biogeography, all analyses were rooted at an all-zeros outgroup (cf. Cracraft, 1991;Lieberman, 2000;Van Veller et al, 2000;Crisci et al, 2003;Matamoros et al, 2015). No specific treatment was applied to redundant distributions (areas with more than one taxon in the cladogram).…”

“…The method is based on the ideas of Brooks (1981) to study coevolution between hosts and parasites. It is one of the most commonly used method in historical biogeography nowadays, including several applications in freshwater fishes (e.g., Matamoros et al, 2015), despite criticism in the literature (Cracraft, 1988;Platnick, 1988;Page, 1990aPage, , 1994aPage, , 1994bRonquist, Nylin, 1990;Nelson, Ladiges, 1991;Carpenter, 1992;van Welzen, 1992;Enghoff, 2000;Ebach, Edgecombe, 2001;Warren, Crother, 2001;Dowling, 2002;Ebach, Humphries, 2002;Siddall, 2004;Siddall, 2005;Siddall, Perkins, 2003;Parenti, 2007;Santos, 2007). In our analyses, the method was applied in two distinct forms, herein called BPA, its original version and BPA 0 , its transformed version.…”

Reproductive life history of Heterandria bimaculata (Heckel, 1848) (Poeciliinae: Poeciliidae) in the Honduran interior highlands: trait variation along an elevational gradient

“…Despite recent gains toward understanding the biogeography of Central American freshwater fishes (Matamoros et al, 2012(Matamoros et al, , 2015, very little is known about the distribution and basic ecology of fishes in the small upland streams of the interior highlands (Miller, 1966, Lyons, 2005, Esselman et al, 2006. Livebearers (Poeciliidae) comprise a substantial portion of the Central American freshwater fish diversity, and are common in most aquatic habitats throughout the region (for example, Matamoros et al, 2009Matamoros et al, , 2012Matamoros et al, , 2015McMahan et al, 2013;Angulo et al, 2013). In fact, poeciliids often are the only taxon of fishes occurring in high-elevation Central American streams.…”

The contribution of environmental factors to fish assemblages in the Río Acahuapa, a small drainage in Central America

“…But, recent initiatives have tried to address this problem completing and reconstructing the information of freshwater fish in Central America (e.g., Matamoros et al, 2012;2014). In El Salvador, this research represents the first ecological assessment of freshwater fishes and contributes to support future studies at local and regional scales.…”