The region with the greatest marine biodiversity on our planet is known as the Coral Triangle or Indo-Australian Archipelago. However, the detailed evolutionary history of this biodiversity hotspot is poorly understood. An international research team has reconstructed how biodiversity has developed over the past 40 million years. The University of Bonn is involved in the study, which has now been published in the journal Nature.
The researchers examined sediment samples from the region in the laboratory and identified the fossils they contained. "We wanted to understand how the diversity of the Indo-Australian Archipelago evolved and persisted in the shallow marines, and what factors were responsible for the disproportionately high diversity in the tropics," says first author Skye Yunshu Tian, who started the study at the University of Hong Kong and completed it in the Department of Paleontology at the University of Bonn.
The researchers found that the archipelago has shown an increase in diversification since the early Miocene (around 20 million years ago). Around 2.6 million years ago, the number of species approached a plateau. There were no major extinction events during the entire study period. "The increase in diversity was primarily driven by the habitat factor, as tectonic collisions in Southeast Asia created extensive areas of shallow marine habitats," says Skye Yunshu Tian.
Around 14 million years ago, thermal stress moderated for the Indo-Australian Archipelago. "This was crucial for the development of the hotspot, as excessively high tropical temperatures in warm climate zones during the Eocene and early Miocene hindered the increase in diversity," reports the scientist from the University of Bonn. This could change in the future: "Our paleobiological results suggest that we could quickly lose the fantastic diversity of the tropical hotspot if the ongoing anthropogenic warming intensifies."
How the Indo-Australian Archipelago became a biodiversity hotspot
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