Evolution of the Yangtze River and its biodiversity

Feng Chen; Ge Xue; Yeke Wang; Hucai Zhang; Peter D Clift; Yaowu Xing; Jun He; James S Albert; Jun Chen; Ping Xie

doi:10.1016/j.xinn.2023.100417

Evolution of the Yangtze River and its biodiversity

Innovation (Camb). 2023 Mar 21;4(3):100417. doi: 10.1016/j.xinn.2023.100417. eCollection 2023 May 15.

Authors

Feng Chen^{1

2}, Ge Xue^{1

2}, Yeke Wang^{1

2}, Hucai Zhang³, Peter D Clift⁴, Yaowu Xing⁵, Jun He¹, James S Albert⁶, Jun Chen¹, Ping Xie^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Donghu Experimental Station of Lake Ecosystems, State Key Laboratory of Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430072, China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
³ Institute for Ecological Research and Pollution Control of Plateau Lakes, School of Ecology and Environmental Science, Yunnan University, Kunming 650500, China.
⁴ Department of Geology and Geophysics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mengla 666303, China.
⁶ Department of Biology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA, USA.

Abstract

Documenting the origins of megadiverse (sub)tropical aquatic ecosystems is an important goal for studies of evolution and ecology. Nonetheless, the geological and ecological establishment of the modern Yangtze River remains poorly understood. Here, we reconstruct the geographic and ecological history of an endemic clade of East Asian fishes based on the mitochondrial phylogenomics analysis of Cyprinidae using 15 fossil calibrations. We estimate an ancestral condition of benthic spawning with demersal or adhesive eggs in southern East Asia before ∼23 Ma and a derived condition of riverine spawning with semibuoyant eggs in the Yangtze by ∼18 Ma. These results imply the formation of Yangtze riverine ecosystems around the Oligocene-Miocene boundary in response to plateau uplift and monsoon strengthening. Some of these cyprinids reverted to benthic spawning with adhesive eggs by ∼15 Ma, a time of rising to peak net diversification rates, indicating the formation of potamo-lacustrine ecosystems by the mid-Miocene during a strong East Asian summer monsoon. Our study provides increased spatiotemporal resolution for the co-evolutionary histories of the Yangtze River and its biodiversity and highlights biological evidence concerning the geomorphological dynamics of the Yangtze River.

Publication types

Review