Mangrove killifishes of the genus Kryptolebias have been historically classified as rare because of their small size and cryptic nature. Major gaps in distribution knowledge across mangrove areas, particularly in South America, challenge the understanding of the taxonomic status, biogeographical patterns and genetic structuring of the lineages composing the self‐fertilizing “ Kryptolebias marmoratus species complex.” In this s...

Aim The disjunct distributions of freshwater organisms along coastal drainages are usually explained by palaeodrainages formed during sea‐level retreats that connected currently isolated basins, or by river capture from tectonic adjustments between adjoining watersheds. We evaluate the relative importance of these events on the genetic variation of freshwater fishes inhabiting the Serra do Mar in eastern Brazil, a region with...

Aim The theory of island biogeography provides a predictive framework relating species richness to island size and distance from the mainland. However, the theory as originally formulated does not necessarily scale to large islands and continental landmasses that are capable of generating species through in situ speciation (rather than entirely by colonization), nor does it necessarily account for how human introduction of spe...

We gathered mitochondrial DNA sequences (557 bp from the control region in 935 specimens and 668 bp of the cytochrome b gene in 139 specimens) of Pacific herring collected from 20 nearshore localities spanning the species’ extensive range along the North Pacific coastlines of Asia and North America. Haplotype diversity and nucleotide diversity were high, and three major phylogeographic lineages (sequence divergences ca. 1.5%)...

As adults, Atlantic eels ( Anguilla rostrata in the Americas and Anguilla anguilla in Europe) are tubular slime‐covered fish that spend most of their catadromous life cycle in coastal environs before swimming far out to sea to reproduce, as part of an intergenerational migratory circuit that provides an interesting reversal of the pattern displayed by adult anadromous salmon that live mostly in the ocean but then migrate long...

Phylogeography has grown explosively in the two decades since the word was coined and the discipline was outlined in 1987. Here I summarize the many achievements and novel perspectives that phylogeography has brought to population genetics, phylogenetic biology and biogeography. I also address future directions for the field. From the introduction of mitochondrial DNA assays in the late 1970s, to the key distinction between ge...

For many species in nature, a sire's progeny may be distributed among a few or many dams. This poses logistical challenges — typically much greater across males than across females — for assessing means and variances in mating success (number of mates) and reproductive success (number of progeny). Here we overcome these difficulties by exhaustively analyzing a population of green swordtail fish ( Xiphophorus helleri ) for gene...

Species that exhibit uniparental postzygotic investment by males are potentially good systems for investigating the interplay of sexual selection, parental care and mating systems. In all species of sea spiders (Class Pycnogonida), males exclusively provide postzygotic care by carrying fertilized eggs until they hatch. However, the mating systems of sea spiders are poorly known. Here we describe the genetic mating system of th...

We employ a battery of 33 polymorphic microsatellite loci to describe geographical population structure of the mangrove killifish ( Kryptolebias marmoratus ), the only vertebrate species known to have a mixed‐mating system of selfing and outcrossing. Significant population genetic structure was detected at spatial scales ranging from tens to hundreds of kilometres in Florida, Belize, and the Bahamas. The wealth of genotypic in...

Supplemental breeding is an intensive population management strategy wherein adults are captured from nature and spawned in controlled settings, and the resulting offspring are later released into the wild. To be effective, supplemental breeding programs require crossing strategies that maximize offspring production while maintaining genetic diversity within each supplemental year class. We used computer simulations to assess...