Widespread reticulate evolution in an adaptive radiation

Abstract A fundamental assumption of evolutionary biology is that phylogeny follows a bifurcating process. However, hybrid speciation and introgression are becoming more widely documented in many groups. Hybrid inference studies have been historically limited to small sets of taxa, while exploration of the prevalence and trends of reticulation at deep time scales remains unexplored. We study the evolutionary history of an adaptive radiation of 109 gemsnakes in Madagascar (Pseudoxyrhophiinae) to identify potential instances of introgression. Using several network inference methods, we find 12 reticulation events within the 22-million-year evolutionary history of gemsnakes, producing 28% of the diversity for the group, including one reticulation that resulted in the diversification of an 18 species radiation. These reticulations are found at nodes with high gene tree discordance and occurred among parental lineages distributed along a north-south axis that share similar ecologies. Younger hybrids occupy intermediate contact zones between the parent lineages showing that post-speciation dispersal in this group has not eroded the spatial signatures of introgression. Reticulations accumulated consistently over time, despite drops in overall speciation rates during the Pleistocene. This suggests that while bifurcating speciation rates may decline as the result of species accumulation and environmental change, speciation by hybridization may be more robust to these processes.