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EVOLUTION
Rapid evolutionary radiation of marine zooplankton in peripheral environments
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, 
Biological, Earth, and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia; Coral Reef Research Foundation, P.O. Box 1765, Koror, PW 96940, Palau; and ¶Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, P.O. Box 951606, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095
Communicated by Robert T. Paine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, May 2, 2005 (received for review January 28, 2005)
Populations of jellyfish, Mastigias sp., landlocked in tropical marine lakes during the Holocene, show extreme genetic isolation (0.74 
ST 1.00), founder effects (genetic diversity: 0.000 
0.001), rapid morphological evolution, and behavioral adaptation. These results demonstrate incipient speciation in what we propose may be modern analogues of Plio-Pleistocene populations isolated in ocean basins by glacially lowered sea level and counterparts to modern marine populations isolated on archipelagos and other distant shores. Geographic isolation in novel environments, even if geologically brief, may contribute much to marine biodiversity because evolutionary rates in marine plankton can rival the most rapid speciation seen for limnetic species, such as cichlids and sticklebacks. Marine lakes present situations rare in their clarity for studying evolution in marine taxa.
founder effect | island | rate of evolution
Abbreviations: COI, cytochrome c oxidase subunit I; GLK, Goby Lake; NLK, Uet era Ngermeuangel; OLO, Ongael Lake; OTM, Ongeim'l Tketau; TLM, Tketau Lake.
Data deposition: The DNA sequence data reported in this paper has been deposited in the GenBank database (accession nos. AY902925
© 2005 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mndawson{at}ucdavis.edu. 
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