Lessons from a natural experiment: Allopatric morphological divergence and sympatric diversification in the Midas cichlid species complex are largely influenced by ecology in a deterministic way.

ABSTRACT: Explaining why some lineages diversify while others do not and how are key objectives in evolutionary biology. Young radiations of closely related species derived from the same source population provide an excellent opportunity to disentangle the relative contributions of possible drivers of diversification. In these settings, lineage-specific effects are shared and can be ruled out. Moreover, the relevant demographic and ecological parameters can be estimated accurately. Midas cichlid fish in Nicaragua have repeatedly colonized several crater lakes, diverged from the same source populations, and, interestingly, diversified in some of them but not others. Here, using the most comprehensive molecular and geometric morphometric data set on Midas cichlids to date (∼20,000 SNPs, 12 landmarks,

SUBMITTER: Kautt AF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6121794 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature