ArticleThe American naturalist2017
What Explains Patterns of Diversification and Richness among Animal Phyla?
Article in The American naturalist, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global evidence of non-pyramidal and uniform ratios of animal diversity across terrestrial trophic levels.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Genetic independence between traits separated by metamorphosis is widespread but varies with biological function.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The radiation continuum and the evolution of frog diversity.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Drivers of diversification in freshwater gastropods vary over deep time.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Multicellularity and sex helped shape the Tree of Life.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Correlated and decoupled evolution of adult and larval body size in frogs.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Review
- Review
- Evolution of diet across the animal tree of life.Evolution letters · 2019Article
- Host defense triggers rapid adaptive radiation in experimentally evolving parasites.Evolution letters · 2019Article
- Evolutionary constraints on species diversity in marine bacterioplankton communities.The ISME journal · 2019Article
- Miocene biome turnover drove conservative body size evolution across Australian vertebrates.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Microhabitat change drives diversification in pholcid spiders.BMC evolutionary biology · 2018Article
- Plant feeding promotes diversification in the Crustacea.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- What Explains Patterns of Diversification and Richness among Animal Phyla?The American naturalist · 2017Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Animal phyla vary dramatically in species richness (from one species to >1.2 million), but the causes of this variation remain largely unknown. Animals have also evolved striking variation in morphology and ecology, including sessile marine taxa lacking heads, eyes, limbs, and complex organs (e.g., sponges), parasitic worms (e.g., nematodes, platyhelminths), and taxa with eyes, skeletons, limbs, and complex organs that dominate terrestrial ecosystems (arthropods, chordates). Relating this remarkable variation in traits to the diversification and richness of animal phyla is a fundamental yet unresolved problem in biology. Here, we test the impacts of 18 traits (including morphology, ecology, reproduction, and development) on diversification and richness of extant animal phyla. Using phylogenetic multiple regression, the best-fitting model includes five traits that explain ∼74% of the variation in diversification rates (dioecy, parasitism, eyes/photoreceptors, a skeleton, nonmarine habitat). However, a model including just three (skeleton, parasitism, habitat) explains nearly as much variation (∼67%). Diversification rates then largely explain richness patterns. Our results also identify many striking traits that have surprisingly little impact on diversification (e.g., head, limbs, and complex circulatory and digestive systems). Overall, our results reveal the key factors that shape large-scale patterns of diversification and richness across >80% of all extant, described species.
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