上原 浩一

Geographic and environmental isolations of islands and the mainland offer excellent opportunity to investigate colonization and survival dynamics of island populations. We inferred and compared evolutionary processes and the demographic history of Rhododendron tsusiophyllum, in the Izu Islands and the much larger island Honshu, treated here as the mainland, using thousands of nuclear SNPs obtained by ddRAD-seq from eight populations of R. tsusiophyllum and three populations of R. tschonoskii as an outgroup. Phylogenetic relationships and their habitats suggest that R. tsusiophyllum had evolved and migrated from cold north to warm south regions. We detected clear genetic divergence among populations in three regions of Honshu and the Izu Islands, suggesting restricted migration between them due to isolated habitats on mountains even in the mainland. The three regions have different changes in effective population size, especially, genetic diversity and population size of the Izu Islands are small compared to the others. Further, habitats of populations in the Izu Islands are warmer than those in Honshu, suggesting that they have undergone adaptive evolution. Our study provides evidences of montane rather than insular isolation on genetic divergence, survival of populations and significance of adaptive evolution for island populations with small population size and low genetic diversity, despite close proximity to mainland populations.

Plants growing in similar climates with extensively overlapping distributions may exhibit similar phylogeographic patterns, due to similarities in range shifts during past climatic oscillations. We tested and exploited this expectation in a comparison of the evolutionary and demographic histories of two related and co-distributed species endemic to Japan-Rhododendron pentaphyllum and R. quinquefolium. Genetic variation in sequences of noncoding chloroplast DNA regions and hundreds of nuclear single nucleotide polymorphisms were used to investigate 191 individuals from 13 populations of R. pentaphyllum and 142 individuals from 10 populations of R. quinquefolium. We found that the two species were not each other's closest relative, and we found different times to the most recent common ancestor of extant populations based on both chloroplast DNA and nuclear SNPs. Rhododendron pentaphyllum exhibited higher genetic variation between populations than R. quinquefolium, while the two species had similar patterns of genetic divergence between regions with slightly different divergence times. These lines of evidence suggest that the similar ranges of the two species are the result of repeated range shifts since speciation during climatic oscillations.