Functional Diversity of Evolutionary Novelties: Insights from Waterfall-Climbing Kinematics and Performance of Juvenile Gobiid Fishes.

ABSTRACT: The evolution of novel functional traits can contribute substantially to the diversification of lineages. Older functional traits might show greater variation than more recently evolved novelties, due to the accrual of evolutionary changes through time. However, functional complexity and many-to-one mapping of structure to function could complicate such expectations. In this context, we compared kinematics and performance across juveniles from multiple species for two styles of waterfall-climbing that are novel to gobiid fishes: ancestral "powerburst" climbing, and more recently evolved "inching", which has been confirmed only among species of a single genus that is nested within the clade of powerburst climbers. Similar net climbing speeds across inching species seem, at first, to indicat

SUBMITTER: Blob RW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7671142 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature