What is it about?
Allometry, the tight relationship between the overall body size and the part of body, is a classical "non-adaptive" explanation for organismal diversity. Brain size in particular is a trait strongly correlated with overall body size, giving rise to a long-standing controversy of whether allometry constraints or facilitates adaptive brain size evolution. This paper examines the role of allometry in brain size evolution of cichlids from Lake Tanganyika.
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Why is it important?
Our results show that the intercept of brain-body static allometry (i.e. allometry across adult individuals within species) evolved, but the slope did not. The static allometric slopes are also remarkably similar to evolutionary allometric slope (i.e. allometry across species), meaning that brain and body size evolved along a similar direction at both within- and across-species levels. These results suggest that allometry may represent an important evolutionary constraints in brain evolution of Lake Tanganyika cichlids.
Perspectives
This paper is one of few studies in which large-scale macroevolutionary patterns (40 cichlid species) are studied using a densely sampled microevolutionary (i.e. within-species) data. This approach allows for a test of how processes at microevolutionary levels scale up to macroevolutionary patterns. I hope this study will stimulate a research of macroevolution using within-species variation, instead of species means.
Dr. Masahito Tsuboi
Universitetet i Oslo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evolution of brain-body allometry in Lake Tanganyika cichlids, Evolution, June 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/evo.12965.
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