The Great Lakes region of East Africa, including Lake Victoria, is the center of diversity of the mega-diverse cichlid fishes (Perciformes: Teleostei). Paleolimnological evidence indicates dramatic desiccation of this lake ca. 18,000-15,000 years ago. Consequently, the hundreds of extant endemic haplochromine species in the lake must have either evolved since then or refugia must have existed, ...

Lake Victoria harbors a unique species-rich flock of more than 500 endemic haplochromine cichlid fishes. The origin, age, and mechanism of diversification of this extraordinary radiation are still debated. Geological evidence suggests that the lake dried out completely about 14,700 years ago. On the basis of phylogenetic analyses of almost 300 DNA sequences of the mitochondrial control region o...

Using satellite gravimetric and altimetric data, we examine trends in water storage and lake levels of multiple lakes in the Great Rift Valley region of East Africa for the years 2003–2008. GRACE total water storage estimates reveal that water storage declined in much of East Africa, by as much as 60 mm year, while altimetric data show that lake levels in some large lakes dropped by as much as ...

The ∼ 500 species of the cichlid fish species flock of Lake Victoria, East Africa, have evolved in a record-setting 100 000 years and represent one of the largest adaptive radiations. We examined the population structure of the endangered cichlid species Xystichromis phytophagus from Lake Kanyaboli, a satellite lake to Lake Victoria in the Kenyan Yala wetlands. Two sets of molecular markers wer...

Cichlid fishes in Lake Victoria are model organisms for studying rapid radiation and speciation. On the way to examine the molecular basis of how these cichlid fishes achieved such a remarkable morphological diversification, we constructed a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library derived from a cichlid species, Haplochromis chilotes, from Lake Victoria. The library includes 157,056 clone...

Phylogenetic analyses based on mitochondrial (mt) DNA have indicated that the cichlid species flock of the Lake Victoria region is derived from a single ancestral species found in East African rivers, closely related to the ancestor of the Lake Malawi cichlid species flock. The Lake Victoria flock contains ten times less mtDNA variation than the Lake Malawi radiation, consistent with current es...

Lake Victoria is an international waterbody that offers the riparian communities a large number of extremely important environmental services. Over the past three decades or so, the lake has come under increasing and considerable pressure from a variety of interlinked human activities such as overfishing, species introductions, industrial pollution, eutrophication, and sedimentation. In this pa...

Late Holocene Environmental Reconstructions from Lake Solai, Kenya Michelle Goman, Gail M. Ashley, R. Bernhart Owen, Victoria C. Hover & Dev K. Maharjan To cite this article: Michelle Goman, Gail M. Ashley, R. Bernhart Owen, Victoria C. Hover & Dev K. Maharjan (2017): Late Holocene Environmental Reconstructions from Lake Solai, Kenya, The Professional Geographer, DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2016.1266...

X. Moreira (http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0166-838X) ([email protected]), Misión Biológica de Galicia (MBG-CSIC), Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain. – B. Castagneyrol, BIOGECO, INRA, Univ. Bordeaux, Cestas, France. – L. Abdala-Roberts (http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1394-3043), Depto de Ecología Tropical, Campus de Ciencias Biológicas y Agropecuarias, Univ. Autόnoma de Yucatán, Itzimná, Mérida, Yucatán, Mé...