Speciation despite gene flow in two owls (Aegolius ssp.): Evidence from 2,517 ultraconserved element loci
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract New study systems and tools are needed to understand how divergence and speciation occur between lineages with gene flow. Migratory birds often exhibit divergence despite seasonal migration, which brings populations into contact with one another. We studied divergence between 2 subspecies of Northern Saw-whet Owl (Aegolius acadicus), in which a sedentary population on the islands of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia (A. a. brooksi), exists in the presence of the other form (A. a. acadicus) during migration but not during the breeding season. Prior research showed fixed mtDNA divergence but left open the question of nuclear gene flow. We used 2,517 ultraconserved element loci to examine the demographic history of this young taxon pair. Although we did not observe fixed single nucleotide polymorphism differences between populations among our genotyped individuals, 100% of the birds were diagnosable and δaδI analyses suggested the demographic model best fitting the data was one of split-bidirectional-migration (i.e. speciation with gene flow). We dated the split between brooksi and acadicus to ~278 Kya, and our analyses suggested gene flow between groups was skewed, with ~0.7 individuals per generation coming from acadicus into brooksi and ~4.4 going the opposite direction. Coupled with an absence of evidence of phenotypic hybrids and the birds’ natural history, these data suggest brooksi may be a young biological species arising despite historic gene flow.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".