Equilibrium Bird Species Diversity in Atlantic Islands

摘要: Summary Half a century ago, MacArthur and Wilson proposed that the number of species on islands tends toward dynamic equilibrium diversity around which richness fluctuates [1]. The current prevailing view in island biogeography accepts fundamentals Wilson's theory [2] but questions whether their prediction can be fulfilled over evolutionary timescales, given unpredictable ever-changing nature geological biotic features [3–7]. Here we conduct complete molecular phylogenetic survey terrestrial bird from four oceanic archipelagos make up diverse Macaronesian bioregion—the Azores, Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Madeira [8, 9]. We estimate times at birds colonized speciated archipelagos, including many previously unsampled endemic non-endemic taxa closest continental relatives. develop fit new multi-archipelago stochastic model to these data, explicitly incorporating information 91 taxa, both extant and extinct. Remarkably, find all have independently achieved maintained millions years. Biogeographical rates are homogeneous across except for exhibit higher speciation colonization. Our finding avian communities display an pattern indicates plateau may rapidly where in situ radiation low extinction is high. This study reveals processes more prevalent than recently proposed, supporting 50-year-old theory.