Biogeografia dos polistíneos neotropicais: uma abordagem ecológica e evolutiva

Abstract

Despite the huge diversity in the Neotropical region, little is known about the biogeography of the subfamily Polistinae. This thesis is divided into three chapters which, despite their distinct specific aims, have as central target the discussion of the influence of environmental, ecological and evolutionary processes on the distribution of genetic diversity and species richness of polistines. For this end, in the first chapter is provided a wide review on the origins of Polistinae and change-promoter processes in the Neotropics. In the second chapter, possible colonization routes used by the subfamily in the Americas are proposed based on the Round-trip hypothesis. Such a hypothesis is corroborated by the recurrence of progression rules, inferred by phylogeny-distribution relationships, pointing more basal clades of several genera occurring in the Amazonian rainforest and more derived clades in eastern South America. The occurrence of an inverse progression rule for Polistes sustains a second rarer and older route from east to west. The third chapter focuses on the disjunction between Amazonia and Atlantic Forest and on the species that, due to changes in forest distributions, had their populations fragmented. It is provided in this study a wide list with 127 Neotropical taxa with disjunct lineages between both forests, climate stability models for eight species (two paper wasps and six vertebrates) and extensive phylogeographies for the wasps Angiopolybia pallens and Synoeca surinama. Such wasp species were used as genetic models to test spatially-esplicit hypotheses of climate stability and were chosen by present distinct ecological characteristics, but occur in sympatry in Amazonia and Atlantic Forest. It was aimed with this to test the following hypothesis: the disjunction affected idiosyncratically the genetic diversity of species with populations widely fragmented. The information presented in the three studies might serve as support in future works on Polistinae biogeography, mainly those that focus on the integration of environmental events to explain both evolutionary and ecological processes.