Phenotypic variation within and between species during early radiation stages

DOI

Recent radiations provide rare windows into the early stages of diversification. With the advent of second- and third-generation DNA sequencing technologies, it is now possible to study this process at the whole-genome level. However, few studies have taken a similarly comprehensive approach at the phenotypic level. This is what we do here, using the hamlets (Hypoplectrus spp.) as a model system. These reef fishes from the Greater Caribbean have diversified rapidly into 18+ species that differ essentially in terms of color pattern. Using a recently developed workflow, we analyzed \emph{in situ} photographs of 571 fishes from 14 species at pixel resolution with a fully standardized and automated procedure. The results show that sympatric species form phenotypic clusters that are significantly different from each other, but still exhibit substantial within-species variation and between-species overlap. At the scale of the Greater Caribbean, geographic variation within species further contributes to this overlap, resulting in nearly continuous variation across the entire radiation. A complementary dataset of 327 genomes from 18+ species indicates that similar patterns are observed at the population genomic level. These results demonstrate that sympatric clusters are maintained by selection on a phenotypic and genomic substrate that is largely continuous and shared across species.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.974433
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.974433
Provenance
Creator Coulmance, Floriane ORCID logo; Heckwolf, Melanie ORCID logo; Gismann, Jakob; Kafle, Tane; Domínguez-Domínguez, Omar; Awhida, Karim; Helmkampf, Martin; McMillan, W Owen; Puebla, Oscar ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2025
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; Data access is restricted (moratorium, sensitive data, license constraints); https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess false
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 5139 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-96.074W, -9.382S, -60.799E, 25.044N); USA; Panama; Tobago; Belize; US Virgin Islands; Mexico; Puerto Rico
Temporal Coverage Begin 2017-03-18T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2023-06-12T00:00:00Z