Study
Ancient climate change, antifreeze, and the evolutionary diversification of Antarctic fishes
Near, Thomas J.; Dornburg, Alex; Kuhn, Kristen L.; Eastman, Joseph T.; Pennington, Jillian N.; Patarnello, Tomaso; Zane, Lorenzo; Fernández, Daniel A.; Jones, Christopher D.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012
Built a dated phylogeny of the notothenioid fishes and compared the timing of antifreeze evolution with the timing of the group’s diversification and of Antarctic cooling.
- Studied in
- Notothenioidei
- Sample size
- phylogenetic and dating analysis across the group
Antifreeze evolved roughly ten million years before the group diversified. The radiation did not follow immediately from the innovation but from later environmental change.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
A key innovation does not automatically produce a radiation; the ecological opportunity has to arrive as well, and here it arrived long afterwards.
How NatureHQ reads it
Kept because it complicates the tidy story. The usual telling is that antifreeze let these fish take over the Southern Ocean; the dates say the protein sat around for ten million years first. Innovation and opportunity are separate requirements.
- Divergence dating carries substantial uncertainty, and the ten-million-year gap is an estimate with error bars.
- Fossil calibration for this group is limited.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesPublished in PNAS.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1115169109
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-03.