The provocative study by Yamahira et al. hypothesizes that one species, Oryzias setnai, endemic to coastal areas of west-flowing streams of the Western Ghats, is the sister species of all other ricefishes and that it diverged in the late Mesozoic. They conclude India is the center of origin of ricefishes, the ancestral lineage of which subsequently diversified and dispersed to occupy its current broad range throughout Asia and Southeast Asia. This scenario is presented as the only possible conclusion from the molecular phylogenetic analysis. We challenge their scenario and conclusions based on a reanalysis of their data.

Reanalyses of an existing data set with varying parameters. Data set comprises four phylogenetic tree files with different scaling factors, a species distribution file and 20 result files from RASP analyses differing in various parameter settings.