Genetic Adaptation and Speciation in Darwin’s Finches and Atlantic Herring

Natural selection acts on existing genetic variation to drive genetic adaptation of organisms to various ecological niches. Interaction between closely related populations, through processes such as competition and hybridization, may either lead to their divergence or population fusion, which has consequences for adaptation and the formation of species. This thesis aims to use two natural populations, Darwin’s finches and Atlantic herring, as models to explore the genetic mechanisms underlying ecological adaptation and speciation. The ecological adaptation of Darwin’s finches across the Galápagos Islands is primarily reflected by variation in beak morphology. Using whole-genome re-sequencing of all Darwin’s finch species, we discover that a locus, HMGA2, is highly associated with variation in beak size. Data collected before and after a severe drought show that this locus plays a critical role for ecological character displacement in large ground finches Geospiza magnirostris and medium ground finches G. fortis. Genomic islands of divergence refer to genomic regions of elevated divergence when comparing the genomes of closely related taxa. Establishment of these genomic islands can reflect a role in reproductive isolation or be related to ecological adaptation or background selection. Investigating their properties can shed light on how new species evolve. We study the landscape of genomic islands in Darwin’s finches, and find that the most pronounced genomic islands are likely ancient balanced polymorphisms, which govern adaptive variation in beak morphology. Hybridization is increasingly recognized as an important evolutionary process which may lead to speciation. We study two cases of hybridization in Darwin’s finches. In the first case, a new lineage of Darwin’s finches was founded through hybridization between a resident medium ground finch G. fortis and an immigrant Española cactus finch G. conirostris. In the second case, female-biased introgression occurred predominantly from medium ground finches G. fortis to common cactus finches G. scandens. Our genetic analysis on the mosaic genomes of hybrid finches show that non-random mating and natural selection primarily determine the outcome of hybridization. We generate a chromosome-level assembly of the Atlantic herring with a total size of 726 Mb, which coincides with a high-resolution linkage map and an LD-based recombination map. This facilitates the identification of an ~8Mb inversion, which is likely to be associated with ecological adaptation in herring to differences in water temperature. The contiguity of the assembly sorts placement of loci under selection that were identified based on a previous, highly fragmented draft assembly of the herring genome