Dispersal out of Wallacea spurs diversification of Pteropus flying foxes, the world’s largest bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera)

Aim Islands provide opportunities for isolation and speciation. Many landmasses in the Indo-Australian Archipelago (IAA) are oceanic islands, and founder-event speciation is expected to be the predominant form of speciation of volant taxa on these islands. We studied the biogeographic history of flying foxes, a group with many endemic species and a predilection for islands, to test this hypothesis and infer the biogeographic origin of the group. Location Australasia, Indo-Australian Archipelago, Madagascar, Pacific Islands. Taxon Pteropus (Pteropodidae). Methods To infer the biogeographic history of Pteropus, we sequenced up to 6,169 bp of genetic data from 10 markers and reconstructed a multilocus species tree of 34 currently recognized Pteropus species and subspecies with three Acerodon outgroups using BEAST and subsequently estimated ancestral areas using models implemented in BioGeoBEARS. Results Species-level resolution was occasionally low because of slow rates of molecular evolution and/or recent divergences. Older divergences, however, were more strongly supported and allow the evolutionary history of the group to be inferred. The genus diverged in Wallacea from its common ancestor with Acerodon; founder-event speciation out of Wallacea was a common inference. Pteropus species in Micronesia and the western Indian Ocean were also inferred to result from founder-event speciation. Main conclusions Dispersal between regions of the IAA and the islands found therein fostered diversification of Pteropus throughout the IAA and beyond. Dispersal in Pteropus is far higher than in most other volant taxa studied to date, highlighting the importance of inter-island movement in the biogeographic history of this large clade of large bats.