Format: ORAL

Seth D. Musker1, Nicolai M. Nrk2, G. Anthony Verboom1, Michael D. Pirie3

1 Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa 2 Department of Plant Systematics, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany 3 University Museum of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Of the roughly 900 species of Erica worldwide, 690 (75%) occur in the Cape Floristic Region. This taxonomic diversity is accompanied by an impressive array of floral phenotypes corresponding to different modes of pollination, including wind, bird, bee, fly, and even rodent pollination. We focused on a clade with evidence of multiple shifts between bee and sunbird pollination syndromes and used genome-wide data to improve on previous estimates of the clades phylogeny. This provided a much clearer picture of the groups evolutionary history; however, the picture is still by no means clear. What we can say is that the group’s diversification happened very rapidly and is certainly still ongoing. Intriguingly, budding speciation – which is when one species gives rise to a new species without itself changing at all – appears to be a common occurrence and is often accompanied by a shift from bird to bee pollination. The prevalent paradigm of speciation by bifurcation might therefore be a poor model of what really happened during the group’s spectacular diversification.