Dispersal out of Wallacea spurs diversification of Pteropus flying foxes, the world’s largest bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera)

Aim: Islands provide opportunities for isolation and speciation. Many landmasses in the Indo-Australian Archipelago (IAA) are oceanic islands, and founder-event speciation is expected to be the predominant form of speciation of volant taxa on these islands. We studied the biogeographic history of flying foxes, a group with many endemic species and a predilection for islands, to test this hypothesis and infer the biogeographic origin of the group.

Location: Australasia, Indo-Australian Archipelago, Madagascar, Pacific Islands

Taxon: Pteropus (Pteropodidae)

Methods: To infer the biogeographic history of Pteropus, we sequenced up to 6169 bp of genetic data from 10 markers and reconstructed a multilocus species tree of 34 currently recognized Pteropus species and subspecies with 3 Acerodon outgroups using BEAST and subsequently estimated ancestral areas using models implemented in BioGeoBEARS.

Results: Species-level resolution was occasionally low because of slow rates of molecu...