Animation of add.species.to.genus function

My package phytools has seen many & diverse changes since it was last updated on CRAN. I'm trying to get a new version up in advance of some workshops that I will be doing this month (at the Evolution meeting) and in July. My second phytools goal for the year is to submit a new manuscript describing the metaphoric 'version 2.0' of the package to reflect the numerous & varied changes to phytools since it's original publication in 2012.

As I work through some of the older package functions, I ran across bug report regarding the (mis)behavior of the function add.species.to.genus on large trees - in which (evidently) the function at some point, after many taxa have been added iteratively, spontaneously decides that the tree is no longer ultrametric and drops all edge lengths.

Without having a reproducible example to work from, this is hard to diagnose completely - but I strongly suspect it stems from using an empirical tree read from a file in which edge lengths are rounded (as they invariably must be). This can probably be resolved by using the phytools function force.ultrametric before running the function.

As far as I can tell when the tree is ultrametric to the numerical precision of R this is not a problem.

For fun, here is an example in which I will randomly add 100 taxa to a phylogeny of 10 species in 5 genera & animate it by coloring the edges of the tree by the genus that they belong to:

library(phytools)
tree

## 
## Phylogenetic tree with 10 tips and 9 internal nodes.
## 
## Tip labels:
##  Genus1_sp1, Genus1_sp2, Genus2_sp1, Genus2_sp2, Genus2_sp3, Genus3_sp1, ...
## 
## Rooted; includes branch lengths.

plotTree(tree,ftype="i")

for(i in 1:length(new.sp)){
    tree<-add.species.to.genus(tree,new.sp[i],where="random")
    MRCA<-vector()
    tips<-lapply(lapply(genera,grep,tree$tip.label),function(x,y)
        y[x],y=tree$tip.label)
    MRCA<-sapply(tips,function(x,y){
        if(length(x)>1) findMRCA(y,x) 
        else getParent(y,which(y$tip.label==x))
        },y=tree)
    painted<-tree
    for(j in 1:length(MRCA)) painted<-paintSubTree(painted,MRCA[j],j+1)
    cols<-setNames(cols<-c("grey",brewer.pal(5,"Accent")),1:6)
    dev.hold()
    plotTree(tree,ftype="off",lwd=4)
    plot(painted,cols,ftype="off",add=TRUE)
    dev.flush()
}

(The .gif creation is actually integrated into this workflow using ImageMagick.)

Here is how the original tree & taxa to be added were simulated:

set.seed(1)
tree<-phytools:::lambdaTree(pbtree(n=10),0.3)
tree$tip.label[1:2]<-paste("Genus1_sp",1:2,sep="")
tree$tip.label[3:5]<-paste("Genus2_sp",1:3,sep="")
tree$tip.label[6:7]<-paste("Genus3_sp",1:2,sep="")
tree$tip.label[8]<-"Genus4_sp1"
tree$tip.label[9:10]<-paste("Genus5_sp",1:2,sep="")
genera<-paste("Genus",1:5,sep="")
sp<-sapply(genera,function(x,y) length(grep(x,y)),y=tree$tip.label)
new.sp<-vector()
for(i in 1:100){
    ii<-sample(1:5,1)
    sp[ii]<-sp[ii]+1
    new.sp[i]<-paste(genera[ii],"_sp",sp[ii],sep="")
}

That's all.