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Global richness patterns of venomous snakes reveal contrasting influences of ecology and history in two different clades

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Abstract

Recent studies addressing broad-scale species richness gradients have proposed two main primary drivers: contemporary climate and evolutionary processes (differential balance between speciation and extinction). Here, we analyze the global richness patterns of two venomous snake clades, Viperidae and Elapidae. We used ordinary least squares multiple regression (OLS) and partial regression analysis to investigate to what extent actual evapotranspiration (AET; summarizing current environmental conditions) and biogeographical regions (representing evolutionary effects) were associated with species richness. For viperids, AET explained 45.6% of the variance in richness whereas the effect of this variable for elapids was almost null (0.5%). On the other hand, biogeographic regions were the best predictors of elapid richness (56.5%), against its relatively small effect (25.9%) in viperid richness. Partial regressions also revealed similar patterns for independent effects of climate and history in both clades. However, the independent historical effect in Elapidae decreased from 45.2 to 17.8% when we excluded Australia from the analyses, indicating that the strong historical effect that had emerged for the global richness pattern was reflecting the historical process of elapid radiation into Australia. Even after excluding Australia, the historical signal in elapid richness in the rest of the globe was still significant and much higher than that observed in viperid richness at a global scale (2.7% after controlling for AET effects). Differences in the evolutionary age of these two clades can be invoked to explain these contrasting results, in that viperids probably had more time for diversification, generating richness responses to environmental gradients, whereas the pattern of distribution of elapid richness can be more directly interpreted in an evolutionary context. Moreover, these results show the importance of starting to adopt deconstructive approaches to species richness, since the driving factors of these patterns may vary from group to group according to their evolutionary history.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Hawkins and an anonymous reviewer for useful suggestions. L. C. T. thanks the Universidad de Alcalá at Alcalá de Henares for their hospitality during the preparation of the data and the CAPES (PDEE-CAPES Process: 5142/06-7) for the financial support. Work by J. A. F. D.-F. is supported by a CNPQ researcher fellowship. The Spanish Ministry of Education and Science has supported M. Á. R., R. M. V. and M. R. (grant: CGL2006-03000/BOS to M. Á. R.), as well as M. Á. O.-T. (FPU fellowship: AP2005-0636), and I. M.-C. (FPI fellowship: BES-2007-16314).

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  1. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biologia Animal, Universidade de Brasília, Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro, 70.910-900, Brasília, DF, Brazil

    Levi Carina Terribile

  2. Department of Ecology, University of Alcala, 28871, Alcalá de Henares, Spain

    Miguel Ángel Olalla-Tárraga, Ignacio Morales-Castilla, Marta Rueda, Rosa M. Vidanes & Miguel Ángel Rodríguez

  3. Departamento de Biologia Geral, ICB, Universidade Federal de Goiás, CP 131, 74.001-970, Goiânia, GO, Brazil

    Levi Carina Terribile & José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho

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Terribile, L.C., Olalla-Tárraga, M.Á., Morales-Castilla, I. et al. Global richness patterns of venomous snakes reveal contrasting influences of ecology and history in two different clades. Oecologia 159, 617–626 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-008-1244-2

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