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- Title
Dissecting a potential spandrel of adaptive radiation: Body depth and pectoral fin ecomorphology coevolve in Lake Malawi cichlid fishes.
- Authors
Hulsey, Christopher D.; Holzman, Roi; Meyer, Axel
- Abstract
The evolution of body shape reflects both the ecological factors structuring organismal diversity as well as an organism's underlying anatomy. For instance, body depth in fishes is thought to determine their susceptibility to predators, attractiveness to mates, as well as swimming performance. However, the internal anatomy influencing diversification of body depth has not been extensively examined, and changes in body depth could arise as a by‐product of functional changes in other anatomical structures. Using an improved phylogenetic hypothesis for a diverse set of Lake Malawi cichlid fishes, we tested the evolutionary association between body depth and the height of the pectoral girdle. To refine the functional importance of the observed substantial correlation, we also tested the coevolution of pectoral girdle height and pectoral fin area. The extensive coevolution of these traits suggests body depth in fishes like the Lake Malawi cichlids could diverge simply as a by‐product of being tightly linked to ecomorphological divergence in other functional morphological structures like the pectoral fins. This study uses an improved phylogenetic hypothesis for a diverse set of Lake Malawi cichlid fishes to test the evolutionary association between body depth, the height of the pectoral girdle, and the area of the pectoral fins. Body depth is often assumed to be functionally important and an adaptively diverging trait in many groups of fishes, but few studies, has examined the internal anatomy that gives rise to this trait. The evidence for extensive coevolution of body depth with pectoral fin morphology that we find for the Lake Malawi cichlids surprisingly suggests that body depth could often diverge simply as a by‐product of being tightly linked to ecomorphological divergence of other important anatomical structures such as the pectoral girdle.
- Subjects
CICHLIDS; ADAPTIVE radiation; PECTORAL fins; FINS (Anatomy); PHYLOGENETIC models
- Publication
Ecology & Evolution (20457758), 2018, Vol 8, Issue 23, p11945
- ISSN
2045-7758
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/ece3.4651