Historical demography and species distribution models shed light on
speciation in primates of northeast India
- Mihir Trivedi,
- Kunal Arekar,
- Shivakumara Manu,
- Lukas Kuderna,
- Jeffrey Rogers,
- Farh Kyle,
- Tomas Marques-Bonet,
- Govindhaswamy Umapathy
Mihir Trivedi
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology CSIR
Author ProfileShivakumara Manu
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology CSIR
Author ProfileAbstract
Northeast India, with its variety of geographical features and
topography, provides a plethora of niches for species to evolve and
thrive. Among a multitude of factors, past climate change is one of the
important factors influencing primate speciation in this region.
Populations of various species could have risen or declined in response
to these climatic fluctuations. Recent advances in climate modelling as
well as genomic data analysis has paved the way for understanding how
species accumulate at a particular geographic region. We utilized these
methods to explore the primate diversity in the unique region of
northeast India. To ascertain these population level changes, we
inferred demographic history of nine species of primates found in
northeast India with MSMC2 and compared it with species distribution
models using past climate data of Pliocene and Pleistocene period.
Through this study, we are able to give a detailed picture of how past
climatic changes have affected the present species diversity and we show
that the primate diversity in northeast India is a mix of species either
originated there or have dispersed from mainland southeast Asia. We
observe that effective population size has decreased for all the
species, but distributions are different for all the four genera,
Macaca, Trachypithecus, Hoolock and Nycticebus, and this provides
important insights pertaining to present primate diversity in the
region. It also gives an idea about how each species is affected
differently by climate change, and why it should be given emphasis in
framing species-wise conservation models for future climate change.