Speciation and historical demography of the land snails sister species Candidula unifasciata and C. rugosiuscula (Geomitridae)

Speciation is one of the most fascinating and simultaneously still enigmatic processes in evolutionary biology. Whole-genome comparisons between closely related species provides new insights in the mechanisms involved in speciation like ecological adaptations, gene-flow or hybridization. We selected two closely related land snails species, Candidula unifasciata and C. rugosiuscula, to investigate the evolutionary processes driving speciation with whole genome data. We also employed approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods to infer the demographic history between the two closely related species.