Meeting Abstract
The genus Cyrtodactylus is a hyper-diverse group of lizards ranging from South Asia to Melanesia, with a dense concentration in the Sundaland region. The lizards are successful in both degraded and primary rainforests and they excel in habitats that offer opportunities for climbing. Their scansorial lifestyle and ability to partition substrates and microhabitats allows up to three congeners to be found living sympatrically in a given area. Four primary environmental associations have been recorded throughout their range: leaf/twig, tree trunk, swamp, and rock. By focusing on the species in eastern Malaysia on the island of Borneo, we sought to determine whether geographically disjunct species inhabiting similar niches were converging on a specific morphology. To understand if the species sharing a given niche are closely related, we generated species trees using one mitochondrial and three nuclear loci. We found that habitat preference does not correlate with species relatedness, indicating that multiple independent invasions of specific niches have occurred. With the polyphyletic relationships amongst substrate specialists, we looked for morphological characteristics shared between representatives from each of the four ecotypes to determine if convergent evolution is occurring. Using the morphological characters, we conducted a principal component analysis which shows only weak clustering for substrate association. With a lack of support for the monophyly of ecotypes and little evidence for convergence, we suggest that the success of the genus stems from a combination of having a strong ability to climb while retaining a relatively large, generalist body.
