The interplay of color and bioacoustic traits in the speciation of a
Southeast Asian songbird complex
Abstract
Morphological traits have served generations of biologists as a
taxonomic indicator, and have been the main basis to delineate species
for museum taxonomists for centuries. Widespread awareness of the
importance of behavioural characters, such as vocalizations, has arisen
much more recently, and the relative importance of these different
traits in the speciation process remains poorly understood. To shed more
light on the interplay between morphological and behavioral traits in
the speciation process, we generated a draft genome of a cryptic
Southeast Asian songbird, the Limestone Wren-babbler Napothera
crispifrons, and re-sequenced whole genomes of multiple individuals of
all three traditional subspecies and a distinct leucistic population
that had previously been misinterpreted as a plumage polymorphism. We
demonstrate strong genomic and mitochondrial divergence among all three
taxa, pointing to the existence of three species-level lineages. Despite
its great phenotypic distinctness, the leucistic population was
characterized by shallow genomic differentiation from its neighbor, with
only a few localized regions emerging as highly-diverged. Quantitative
bioacoustic analysis across multiple traits revealed deep differences
especially between the two taxa characterized by limited plumage
differentiation. Our study demonstrates that speciation in these furtive
songbirds is not governed by the evolution of marked color differences,
but is regulated by an interplay between color and bioacoustic traits.
Extreme color differences can be anchored in few genomic loci and may
therefore arise and subside rapidly.