Abstract
Some populations, including a diverse group of marine populations such as Pacific oysters and Atlantic cod, are highly fecund. Models of high fecundity—coupled with a skewed offspring distribution—have coalescent processes, which admit (simultaneous) multiple mergers of ancestral lineages associated with them. In contrast, the celebrated and extensively employed Kingman’s coalescent only admits pairwise mergers of ancestral lineages. We review multiple merger coalescent models derived from population models, which admit high fecundity and skewed offspring distribution. Inference methods that have been developed based on these multiple merger coalescent models will also be reviewed. In fact, multiple merger coalescent models are able to predict the excess singletons (relative to Kingman’s coalescent predictions) observed in the commercially important Atlantic cod. These models may be applicable to a wide range of natural populations—including a diverse group of marine organisms, viruses, and plants which distribute seeds—with significant implications.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Einar Árnason for helpful comments. The financial support of the DFG Priority Programme SPP1590 ‘Probabilistic Structures in Evolution’ through grant BL 1105/3-1 to Jochen Blath at TU Berlin, and Matthias Birkner at JGU Mainz, is acknowledged. As is the support of the DFG Priority Programme SPP 1819 ‘Rapid Evolutionary Adaptation’ through DFG grant STE 325/17-1 to Wolfgang Stephan. The generous hospitality of TU Berlin is warmly acknowledged.
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Eldon, B. (2016). Inference Methods for Multiple Merger Coalescents. In: Pontarotti, P. (eds) Evolutionary Biology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41324-2_20
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