Recent invasion of the tropical Atlantic by an Indo‐Pacific coral reef fish

Abstract

The last tropical connection between Atlantic and Indian-Pacific habitats closed c. 2 million years ago (Ma), with the onset of cold-water upwelling off southwestern Africa. Yet comparative morphology indicates more recent connections in several taxa, including reef-associated gobies (genus Gnatholepis). Coalescence and phylogenetic analyses of mtDNA cytochrome b sequences demonstrate that Gnatholepis invaded the Atlantic during an interglacial period approximately 145,000 years ago (d = 0.0054), colonizing from the Indian Ocean to the western Atlantic, and subsequently to the central ( approximately 100,000 years ago) and eastern Atlantic ( approximately 30,000 years ago). Census data show a contemporary range expansion in the northeastern Atlantic linked to global warming.