PARSIMONY ANALYSIS OF ENDEMICITY (PAE) OF LUNGFISH GENERA

Parsimony analysis of endemicity (PAE) (Rosen, 1988) uses a parsimony algorithm in order to obtain an area cladogram, based on the taxa inhabiting the areas.

Herein I perform PAE analysis of Lungfish genera using distributional data at different geographical units, in order to assess the importance of the size of the area units. Other earlier phylogenetic and biogeography studies of the lungfish have covered either some genera or species and some just specific zoogeographical regions.

Distributional data were obtained from the review of more than 100 published articles, books and with this information; I constructed a georeferenciated records database. From distributional data, geographic distribution map of each taxa were obtained using ArcView GIS (ESRI, 1999).

Then a presence - absence matrix was generated for the compilation of lungfish genera accross all continents. Binary cluster analysis was applied to the data, and the biogeographic relationships of lungfish genera were examined using Jacard similarity coefficient (J. Rice and Bellarnd 1982, Birks 1987) using R software (Hornik, 2011). The same data were subjected to parsimony analysis of endemicity (PAE; Rosen 1988, Morrone and Crisci 1995 using PAUP 4.0 Swafford, 2000 with hypothetical ancestral continent consisting of all absences as the outgroup, heuristic searches employing TBR branch swapping.

Twenty six most parsimonious cladograms were found and then summarized in a single consensus tree. Six areas (representing six continents) of endemism were identified; South America, North America, Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and Europe. At least one main pattern relate African to South American lungfish genera the vicariance pattern between these two landmasses. These results are comparable to other results obtained in earlier studies.