Methodology: MCMC phylogenetic tip length

ID: 70

Description:

  • We used the supertree method to reconstruct the phylogenetic topology of Scleractinia, comprising 842 reef and 705 non-reef species. The source trees were derived from a molecular phylogeny of 474 species (based on seven mitochondrial DNA markers), 13 morphological trees and a tree based on current taxonomy. We then used BEAST 1.8 to fit the DNA sequence data onto the supertree topology using fossil node calibrations (origins of Caryophyllia to the Oxfordian, Dendrophylliidae to the Barremian, and Flabellum to the Campanian). These were each treated as a lognormal distribution with hard lower bound (age of fossil) and soft upper bound described by log mean and standard deviation of 2.0 and 0.85, respectively. We carried out 10 separate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analyses each with 30 million generations and a sampling interval of 1000. Runs were combined following rejection of the first one-third of all posterior trees. We then calculated the terminal edge length of each species using the APE package in R.

Used for traits:

Added by: Danwei Huang

Observations using this methodology

Turbinaria mesenterina

Turbinaria patula

Turbinaria radicalis

Turbinaria reniformis

Turbinaria stellulata

Turbinolia stephensoni

Vaughanella concinna

Vaughanella margaritata

Vaughanella multipalifera

Vaughanella oreophila

Zoopilus echinatus