7-6 LINKING THE DOTS: Evaluation of the congruence between neutral and selective processes shaping populations and species assemblages in the marine environment

Session: Earth Life Sciences across the Cordillera (Posters)

Poster Booth No.: 12

Presenting Author:

Fausto Valenzuela-Quiñonez

Authors:

Valenzuela-Quiñonez, Fausto¹, De Jesús-Bonilla, Vladimir², Ortíz-Oyola, Daniel Stiven ³, Mac-Louglin-Aleman, Camila ⁴, El Khatabbi-Salazar, Salwa ⁵, Reyes-Bonilla, Héctor⁶, Olivier, Damien⁷

(1) Fisheries Ecology, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste S.C., La Paz, B.C.S, Mexico, (2) Fisheries Ecology, CIBNOR, CDMX, CDMX, Mexico, (3) Fisheries Ecology, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste S.C., La Paz, B.C.S., Mexico, (4) Fisheries Ecology, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste S.C., La Paz, B.C.S., Mexico, (5) Fisheries Ecology, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste S.C., La Paz, B.C.S., Mexico, (6) Departamento Académico de Ciencias Marinas Y Costeras, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur, La Paz, B.C.S., Mexico, (7) Departamento Académico de Ciencias Marinas Y Costeras, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur, ,

Abstract:

Understanding the mechanisms that generate and maintain biodiversity across spatial and environmental gradients is a central challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology. While community ecology has traditionally focused on processes operating at the level of species assemblages—such as environmental filtering, ecological drift, and dispersal—evolutionary biology has emphasized population-level processes, including natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and mutation. Although both disciplines share the goal of explaining spatial patterns of biodiversity, they have largely developed in parallel. However, their integration is essential for advancing a unified eco-evolutionary framework capable of explaining both species turnover and intraspecific genetic divergence across space, as well as their interrelationships and causal effects. Testing specific hypotheses about these interconnections in marine systems requires an ecological setting characterized by high environmental and oceanographic complexity, along with species assemblages that respond to and adapt to such heterogeneity. The Gulf of California represents a natural laboratory, with a rich geological history, pronounced environmental gradients, and complex oceanographic dynamics that have shaped a partially concordant assemblage of diverse marine taxa. In this context, cryptobenthic fishes—owing to their small body size, habitat specificity, and limited dispersal capacity—constitute an ideal system for evaluating the coupling between community-level and evolutionary processes. This study evaluates: (1) the congruence of neutral and adaptive genomic–evolutionary patterns in three co-distributed cryptobenthic fish species belonging to different families; (2) the beta diversity of cryptobenthic fish assemblages across the same geographic scale; and (3) the congruence between lineage divergence and cryptobenthic fish assemblage structure, and their relationship with geographic distance (neutral processes/dispersal/connectivity) and environmental variability (selection/turnover).

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 58, No. 3, 2026

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