Best available science still supports an ancient common origin of Devils Hole and Devils Hole pupfish

Abstract

The age of DHP and how pupfish colonized Devils Hole have always been a topic of interest. Recently, two different publications (Martin, Crawford, Turner, & Simons, & Sağlam et al., ) tackled this issue using genomic data sets and demographic models but came to widely different conclusions. In their comment, Martin and Höhne ( ) argue that our results (Sağlam et al., ) were misleading because we used inappropriate calibration information and biased a priori assumptions. They then re‐analysed our data using a “biologically informed” mutation rate prior and concluded that our data support a much younger age of DHP (12.6 kya) as opposed to 60 kya reported in our study. Below we will summarize why their arguments do not hold up and explore some of the inconsistencies between their claims and what was actually presented in our study. Furthermore, we will demonstrate their re‐analyses provide no new information compared to what was presented in our original manuscript and reinforce our estimate of a 60 kya divergence of DHP as outweighing competing hypotheses.

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