| 4098 |
Hemp |
2001 |
Hemp C.
Cloud forests in East Africa as evolutionary motors for speciation processes of flightless Saltatoria species
Mountains in the Mist: Science for Conservation and Management of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests, Chapter: 18, Publisher: University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu
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High mountains in East Africa are characterized by high biodiversity and a high degree of endemism, especially in the insect group Saltatoria (grasshoppers, locusts and katydids). A conspicuous feature of most high mountains in the region is that they harbour arrays of closely related species within various flightless genera of Saltatoria. This chapter compares inventories of Saltatoria in different mountain massifs of contrasting geologic age in East Africa at the species and genus level. Speciation processes and possible migration events are discussed in detail for Aerotegmina, a highly specialized canopy dweller in cloud forests. Climatic fluctuations and topographic features within the landscape are the driving forces of speciation processes in flightless Saltatoria on East African high mountains. Cloud forests appear particularly suited to examine speciation processes because during times of more extensive forest cover they are sufficiently interconnected but at the same time isolated enough to allow speciation of taxa with narrow habitat demands. During migration events young volcanoes offered more niches for species than geologically older areas but at the genus level geologically young areas exhibited greater similarity. At the species level geographic neighborship is of greater relevance in terms of species congruence. |
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19.07.2019 18:53:11 Nikolai Yunakov |
