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. 2015 Apr 15;2(4):140434.
doi: 10.1098/rsos.140434. eCollection 2015 Apr.

Baleen boom and bust: a synthesis of mysticete phylogeny, diversity and disparity

Felix G Marx  1 , R Ewan Fordyce  2
Affiliations

Baleen boom and bust: a synthesis of mysticete phylogeny, diversity and disparity

Felix G Marx et al. R Soc Open Sci. .

Abstract

A new, fully dated total-evidence phylogeny of baleen whales (Mysticeti) shows that evolutionary phases correlate strongly with Caenozoic modernization of the oceans and climates, implying a major role for bottom-up physical drivers. The phylogeny of 90 modern and dated fossil species suggests three major phases in baleen whale history: an early adaptive radiation (36-30 Ma), a shift towards bulk filter-feeding (30-23 Ma) and a climate-driven diversity loss around 3 Ma. Evolutionary rates and disparity were high following the origin of mysticetes around 38 Ma, coincident with global cooling, abrupt Southern Ocean eutrophication and the development of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). Subsequently, evolutionary rates and disparity fell, becoming nearly constant after approximately 23 Ma as the ACC reached its full strength. By contrast, species diversity rose until 15 Ma and then remained stable, before dropping sharply with the onset of Northern Hemisphere glaciation. This decline coincided with the final establishment of modern mysticete gigantism and may be linked to glacially driven variability in the distribution of shallow habitats or an increased need for long-distance migration related to iron-mediated changes in glacial marine productivity.

Keywords: Mysticeti; baleen whales; disparity; diversity; evolutionary rates; phylogenetics.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Distribution of morphological characters. Numbers refer to morphological character numbers as stored on MorphoBank (www.morphobank.org), project 687.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Dated total-evidence tree of mysticete phylogenetic relationships. Majority-rule consensus tree (showing all compatible clades; ‘allcompat’ option in MrBayes) resulting from the combined analysis of the entire dataset (272 morphological, 37 646 molecular characters). Numbers next to nodes represent posterior probabilities (only values more than or equal to 50 are shown). Stippled lines represent fossil material postdating the oldest occurrence of a given species. Thick grey bars represent actual stratigraphic ranges (Material and methods, and electronic supplementary material). See electronic supplementary material, figure S1, for the range of uncertainty (95% HPD) associated with each node. Pli., Pliocene; Pls., Pleistocene.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Combined phenotypic/genomic evolutionary rates. Branches are colour-coded by rate, with the fastest change occurring along the stem lineage (highlighted in grey) leading from the mysticete stem branch to all major clades. Topology, time scale and names are the same as in figure 2.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Major events in mysticete evolution driven by palaeoenvironmental change. High rates of phenotypic/genomic evolution (a) and an increase in taxonomic diversity (b) and disparity (c) mark an adaptive radiation during the initial phase of mysticete evolution (1), around the time of development of the ACC and the end of a global cooling trend. Rates and disparity subsequently decreased and then became stable from the Early Miocene onwards as the ACC developed its full strength and bulk filtering became the dominant feeding strategy (2). Diversity continued to rise and then remained stable during the Miocene, but markedly crashed towards the recent as the global climate deteriorated (d,e) and probably drove the final establishment of gigantism and, possibly, migration (3). Evolutionary rates represent the average of the mean rates for each branch in the dated total-evidence tree. Grey areas around the evolutionary rates and disparity curves represent the standard error of the mean and 95% confidence intervals (based on 1000 bootstrap replicates), respectively. Carbon and oxygen stable isotope data are from [45,46].
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