ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Environmental change explains cichlid adaptive radiation at Lake Malawi over the past 1.2 million years.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Phylogeography ofAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Habitat-specific temporal variation in the pace of fish diversification.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Recent rapid radiation of apex predators suggests dramatic biodiversity turnover in an ancient lake.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Genome Analyses Reveal Diverse Riverine Genetic Contributions to the Lake Malawi Cichlid Radiation.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Pleistocene Glaciation Drove Shared Population Coexpansion in Eastern North American Snakes.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Large inversions in Lake Malawi cichlids are associated with habitat preference, lineage, and sex determination.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Concurrent Asian monsoon strengthening and early modern human dispersal to East Asia during the last interglacial.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Genome editing in East African cichlids and tilapias: state-of-the-art and future directions.Open biology · 2023Review
- Article
- Speciation across the Earth driven by global cooling in terrestrial orchids.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Exon-based Phylogenomics and the Relationships of African Cichlid Fishes: Tackling the Challenges of Reconstructing Phylogenies with Repeated Rapid Radiations.Systematic biology · 2023Article
- Are 150 km of open sea enough? Gene flow and population differentiation in a bat-pollinated columnar cactus.PloS one · 2023Article
- Taxonomic investigation of the zooplanktivorous Lake Malawi cichlidsHydrobiologia · 2023Article
- Differences among reciprocal hybrids ofHydrobiologia · 2023Article
- Evolutionary time and species diversity in aquatic ecosystems worldwide.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Review
- The climate and vegetation backdrop to hominin evolution in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Phylogeographic relationships and the evolutionary history of the Carassius auratus complex with a newly born homodiploid raw fish (2nNCRC).BMC genomics · 2022Article
- Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa.Science advances · 2021Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Long paleoecological records are critical for understanding evolutionary responses to environmental forcing and unparalleled tools for elucidating the mechanisms that lead to the development of regions of high biodiversity. We use a 1.2-My record from Lake Malawi, a textbook example of biological diversification, to document how climate and tectonics have driven ecosystem and evolutionary dynamics. Before ∼800 ka, Lake Malawi was much shallower than today, with higher frequency but much lower amplitude water-level and oxygenation changes. Since ∼800 ka, the lake has experienced much larger environmental fluctuations, best explained by a punctuated, tectonically driven rise in its outlet location and level. Following the reorganization of the basin, a change in the pacing of hydroclimate variability associated with the Mid-Pleistocene Transition resulted in hydrologic change dominated by precession rather than the high-latitude teleconnections recorded elsewhere. During this time, extended, deep lake phases have abruptly alternated with times of extreme aridity and ecosystem variability. Repeated crossings of hydroclimatic thresholds within the lake system were critical for establishing the rhythm of diversification, hybridization, and extinction that dominate the modern system. The chronology of these changes closely matches both the timing and pattern of phylogenetic history inferred independently for the lake's extraordinary array of cichlid fish species, suggesting a direct link between environmental and evolutionary dynamics.
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