Morphology and efficiency of a specialized foraging behavior, sediment sifting, in neotropical cichlid fishes.

ABSTRACT: Understanding of relationships between morphology and ecological performance can help to reveal how natural selection drives biological diversification. We investigate relationships between feeding behavior, foraging performance and morphology within a diverse group of teleost fishes, and examine the extent to which associations can be explained by evolutionary relatedness. Morphological adaptation associated with sediment sifting was examined using a phylogenetic linear discriminant analysis on a set of ecomorphological traits from 27 species of Neotropical cichlids. For most sifting taxa, feeding behavior could be effectively predicted by a linear discriminant function of ecomorphology across multiple clades of sediment sifters, and this pattern could not be explained by shared evolution

SUBMITTER: Lopez-Fernandez H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3945966 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature