Meeting Abstract

11.5  Sunday, Jan. 4  Ancient signals of South East Asia’s history found in mite harvestmen sequence and morphological data CLOUSE, Ronald M.*; GIRIBET, Gonzalo; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA clouse@fas.harvard.edu

Phylogenetic hypotheses of the cyphophthalmid family Stylocellidae (Arachnida: Opiliones), a type of harvestman, are used to test geologic reconstructions of South East Asia. Phylogenies based on molecular and morphological data recover close relationships among inhabitants of most major landmasses and place derived groups on more recently formed areas. Molecular data consisted of approximately 6 kb from two mitochondrial and four nuclear markers, and they were analyzed with the program POY. Morphological data consisted of 60 scaled measurements and were analyzed using the program TNT. The ancestral home of the family is apparently in the Central Thai-Malay Peninsula, which is also the ancestral terrane that rifted from Gondwana 255 million years ago. Sulawesi appears to have been populated by descendants of an ancestor on West Sulawesi, in concordance with geologic reconstructions of the island, and Borneo is almost exclusively populated by descendants of a single ancestor. Sumatra and to a lesser extent Java, which have had complicated histories of exposure above sea level and connection to the Thai-Malay Peninsula, appear to house multiple lineages. Species in North East India and China are closely related to each other, and, remarkably, to certain Thai species, a relationship that agrees with novel geologic hypotheses for the history of the Indian subcontinent.