In this issue, Valente and colleagues show the long-term diversity of the noctilionoid bat fauna of the Greater Antilles asymptotes toward an equilibrium defined by extinction rates higher than colonization and speciation rates. Recent extinctions, many of them anthropogenic, have shifted diversity away from equilibrium, requiring at least eight million years for the system to recover the diversity lost. Photograph by M. Brock Fenton.
Gallery | February 2017 homepage image 1
Jamaican fruit-eating bat (Artibeus jamaicensis), a recent colonist to the Caribbean islands, in flight.