Convergent evolution in toothed whale cochleae.

Odontocetes (toothed whales) are the most species-rich marine mammal lineage. The catalyst for their evolutionary success is echolocation - a form of biological sonar that uses high-frequency sound, produced in the forehead and ultimately detected by the cochlea. The ubiquity of echolocation in odon...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BMC Evolutionary Biology
Main Authors: Park, Travis, Mennecart, Bastien, Costeur, Loïc, Grohé, Camille, Cooper, Natalie
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: BioMed Central 2019
Subjects:
Convergence
Echolocation
Ecomorphology
Inner ear
Odontoceti
Phylogenetic comparative methods
toothed whale
toothed whales
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-019-1525-x
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31651234
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813997/
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Summary:Odontocetes (toothed whales) are the most species-rich marine mammal lineage. The catalyst for their evolutionary success is echolocation - a form of biological sonar that uses high-frequency sound, produced in the forehead and ultimately detected by the cochlea. The ubiquity of echolocation in odontocetes across a wide range of physical and acoustic environments suggests that convergent evolution of cochlear shape is likely to have occurred. To test this, we used SURFACE; a method that fits Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) models with stepwise AIC (Akaike Information Criterion) to identify convergent regimes on the odontocete phylogeny, and then tested whether convergence in these regimes was significantly greater than expected by chance.

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