Looking from below, far from the flowers, it is almost impossible to differentiate some tree species. Sometimes, even carefully checking reproductive branches (those with flowers and inflorescences) this difficulty still holds. This is the case of a mangrove genus, Rhizophora. In the Brazilian coast, one may find the three species of the genus that occur in the Western hemisphere: R. mangle, R. racemosa and the putative hybrid R. X harrisonii. As expected by previous studies, we observed that introgression and hybridization between species are key evolutionary processes that shape the genetic structure of the genus also in Brazil.
This finding raises the yellow light when one aims to study past demographic changes in these species using genetic markers because different processes (hybridization and demographic changes, for instance) may create similar signs in the genetic profiles.
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