Has Living on Islands Been So Simple? Insights from the Insular Endemic Frog Discoglossus montalentii

Island populations have been extensively used as model systems in ecology, biogeography, conservation and evolutionary biology, owing to the several simplifying assumptions that they allow. Nevertheless, recent findings from intra-island phylogeographic studies are casting doubts on the generality of some of these underlying assumptions. We investigated the phylogeography, historical demography, and population genetic structure of the Corsican endemic frog, Discoglossus montalentii. In contrast with expectations based on its insular, restricted and continuous distribution, we found evidence of 3 phylogroups, whose rather ancient divergence (Early-Middle Pleistocene) was likely primed by climatic changes that occurred during the ‘middle Pleistocene revolution’. Furthermore, their differentiation explained most (68%) of the overall genetic diversity that was observed. These results and the growing evidence from intra-island phylogeographies, suggest that island populations frequently may not conform to some long-standing assumptions, including long-term stability, range-wide panmixia and the correlation of effective population size to the island size. As a consequence, both for theoretical and for applied purposes, the extensive use of these assumptions in the study of island populations warrants a careful re-examination.