Animals have a deep evolutionary relationship with microbial symbionts, such that individual microbes or an entire microbial community can diverge alongside the host. Here, we explore these host-microbe relationships in Echinometra , a sea urchin genus that speciated with the Isthmus of Panama and throughout the Indo-West Pacific. We find that the eggs from five Echinometra species generally associate with a species-specific b...

The evolution of marine neotropical shallow water species is expected to have been greatly affected by physical events related to the emergence of the Central American Isthmus. The anomuran crab Megalobrachium , a strictly neotropical porcellanid genus, consists of four species in the West Atlantic (WA) and nine in the East Pacific (EP). Dispersal is limited to a relatively short planktonic phase, which lasts approximately two...

Aim To test hypothesized biogeographic partitions of the tropical Indo‐Pacific Ocean with phylogeographic data from 56 taxa, and to evaluate the strength and nature of barriers emerging from this test. Location The Indo‐Pacific Ocean. Time period Pliocene through the Holocene. Major taxa studied Fifty‐six marine species. Methods We tested eight biogeographic hypotheses for partitioning of the Indo‐Pacific using a novel modific...

A latitudinal gradient in biodiversity has existed since before the time of the dinosaurs, yet how and why this gradient arose remains unresolved. Here we review two major hypotheses for the origin of the latitudinal diversity gradient. The time and area hypothesis holds that tropical climates are older and historically larger, allowing more opportunity for diversification. This hypothesis is supported by observations that tem...

A phylogeny for 21 species of spatangoid sea urchins is constructed using data from three genes and results compared with morphology‐based phylogenies derived for the same taxa and for a much larger sample of 88 Recent and fossil taxa. Different data sets and methods of analysis generate different phylogenetic hypotheses, although congruence tests show that all molecular approaches produce trees that are congruent with each ot...