Grazing rates of crustacean zooplankton communities on intact phytoplankton communities in Canadian Subarctic lakes and ponds |
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Authors: | Celia C Symons Shelley E Arnott Jon N Sweetman |
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Institution: | 1.Department of Zoology,University of Graz,Graz,Austria;2.Institute of Evolutionary Biology,University of Edinburgh,Edinburgh,UK |
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Abstract: | Quantitative genetic studies in natural populations are of growing interest to speciation research since divergence is often
believed to arise through micro-evolutionary change, caused by natural selection on functional morphological traits. The species
flock of cichlid fishes in Africa’s oldest lake, Lake Tanganyika, offers a rare opportunity to study this process. Using the
cichlid species Tropheus moorii, we assessed the potential for microevolution in a set of morphological traits by estimating their quantitative genetic basis
of variation. Two approaches were employed: (1) estimation of trait heritabilities (h
2) in situ from a sample of wild caught fish, and (2) estimation of h
2 from first generation offspring produced in a semi-natural breeding experiment. In both cases, microsatellite data were used
to infer pedigree structure among the sampled individuals and estimates of h
2 were made using an animal model approach. Although power was limited by the pedigree structures estimated (particularly in
the wild caught sample), we nonetheless demonstrate the presence of significant additive genetic variance for aspects of morphology
that, in the cichlid species Tropheus moorii, are expected to be functionally and ecologically important, and therefore likely targets of natural selection. We hypothesize
that traits showing significant additive genetic variance, such as the mouth position have most likely played a key role in
the adaptive evolution of the cichlid fish Tropheus moorii. |
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