Meeting Abstract
Sparoid fishes form a group of ~ 255 species currently classified in three families (Lethrinidae, Nemipteridae and Sparidae). This group of coastal, demersal fishes shows a remarkable diversity in terms of morphology (body size and shape) and ecology (diet and habitat association). Indeed, various lineages dominate fish communities in temperate soft bottom or rocky reef habitats, while others are major components of tropical coral reef ecosystems. In order to investigate the macroevolutionary pattern of this clade we generated the largest molecular phylogeny for this group, covering ~70% of the extant species diversity and time-calibrated this with seven sparoid fossils. We assembled a dataset of ~ 2300 images from the ichthyological collections of 14 major natural history museums and explored the morphospace of their overall body shape using geometric morphometric methods. We also collected data on body size and species richness from published taxonomic literature and used these data to perform phylogenetic comparative analyses on rates of lineage and phenotype evolution. Our analyses show that the major sparoid lineages all originated during the Late Cretaceous, predating the KPg extinction event. Major bursts of diversification then occurred during the Middle to Late Eocene, as well as during the Miocene, coinciding with dramatic reorganization of coastal benthic communities. We show that durophagy had an important role in driving sparoid evolutionary history. Stochastic mapping strongly suggests that ancestral sparoids were durophagous, while comparison of various models of trait evolution (Brownian motion and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck) shows that durophagy influenced both body size and shape diversification.
