A grant has been awarded to Drs. Nancy Simmons, Rob DeSalle, and Liliana Davalos at the American Museum of Natural History to investigate the relationship between earth and faunal history in the Caribbean region, focusing on bats. The project will generate hypotheses about the evolutionary relationships of 5 different groups of bats, each containing at least one exclusively Antillean species. These evolutionary relationships will then be used to establish the timing and pattern of separation among bat species in the Antilles and their South and Central American relatives, and will also be compared with similar hypotheses about other terrestrial organisms. Drs. Nancy Simmons, Rob DeSalle, and Liliana Davalos will use standard methods for obtaining and analyzing morphological and molecular data from the study groups. Patterns of evolutionary relationships resulting from these data will be compared applying at least 5 different approaches.
This project will be the first to explictly test longstanding assumptions about the evolution of the Caribbean land fauna. The knowledge generated by this project will be essential for future biological studies in ecology, morphology, behavior, and conservation of Caribbean bats. By characterizing patterns of species diversification, this study constitutes an essential step towards understanding the origin and evolution of the fauna of the Caribbean, and ensuring its conservation in unique and increasingly threatened Caribbean ecosystems.
