Ecology and Evolution of Amazonian Fishes: Assembling the Most Diverse Continental Vertebrate Fauna

The rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands of tropical America teem with fishes, in both abundance and variety. The thousands of species who inhabit these waterways exhibit a bewildering display of physiological, morphological, and behavioral specializations. Ecology and Evolution of Amazonian Fishes explains how the freshwater fishes of South America rose to become the most diverse continental vertebrate fauna on Earth. The 46 contributing authors, all experts on particular fish groups, combined efforts to produce four novel and taxonomically coordinated datasets: a comprehensive time-calibrated phylogeny with geographic ranges and behavioral and ecological traits for 6,342 species in 97 families and 880 genera, as well as a syncretic chronology of all the seminal paleogeographic events and conditions in South America over the past 100 million years. These ecological and evolutionary data are used to evaluate prominent theories on the ecology and evolution of South American freshwater fishes.