Ecology: Protecting the evolution of corals
and fish *IMAGES*
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Ecology
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& Evolution
Embargo
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London: Tuesday 12 January 2016 16:00 (GMT)
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New York: Tuesday 12 January 2016 11:00 (EST)
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Tokyo: Wednesday 13 January 2016 01:00 (JST)
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Sydney: Wednesday 13 January 2016 03:00 (AEDT)
Most of the evolutionary diversity of corals and fish is not currently supported by the world’s
network of marine protected areas (MPAs), finds a study in Nature Communications.
Evolutionary diversity is a measure of differences in the length of the branches of evolutionary
trees since species diversification.
Although the total number of different species in an ecosystem is usually taken as a good
measure of its ‘health’, a measure of how closely related species are in evolutionary terms is also
important. This is because closely related species are more likely to perform similar roles in the
ecosystem, whereas more distinct lineages may perform unusual or complementary roles that
are vital for its function.
David Mouillot and colleagues quantify the extent to which evolutionary history is protected in
coral reefs across the globe. They focus on 805 species of coral and 450 species of labrid fish —
both of which are important components of marine biodiversity with well-characterized
evolutionary histories — and calculate how much of these species’ geographic range is covered
by the MPA network. They then assess how much evolutionary history is encompassed by all the
species on a shared evolutionary tree branch relative to this geographic range. They find that,
although the world’s MPA network covers 5.9% of the total coral reef area, this network only
encompasses 1.7% of the total known evolutionary history of corals, while only 17.6% of the
evolutionary history of fish is protected. This means that about 7,160 million years of the
evolutionary history of corals and 3,586 million years of that of fish are not adequately protected
by MPAs.
Although MPAs were originally established to conserve species diversity rather than evolutionary
diversity, the authors argue that the latter is a crucial, often overlooked, component of
biodiversity.
Article and author details
1. Global marine protected areas do not secure the evolutionary
history of tropical corals and fishes
Corresponding Author
David Mouillot
Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France
Email: david.mouillot@univ-montp2.fr, Tel: +33 60 947 2147
DOI
10.1038/ncomms10359
Online paper*
http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/ncomms10359
* Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends).
Geographical listings of authors
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Australia
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, Canada
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, France
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, Singapore
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, Switzerland
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& United States