Meeting Abstract
Natural selection acts upon an organism’s ability to perform well at ecologically-relevant tasks. These tasks are affected by the organism’s underlying phenotypic traits. However, one phenotypic trait does not necessarily impact the performance of a single task. Instead, one trait may affect multiple tasks or many traits may redundantly affect one task. Many-to-many mapping of form-to-function is a concept that considers how multiple phenotypic traits affect multiple performance measures within the same system. However, in previous form and function relationship work, only two measures of performance have been considered at a time. By considering greater numbers of performance measures, we are able to examine how trade-offs and facilitations can affect a given phenotypic trait simultaneously. Here, we look at five different modes of locomotion: bipedal sprinting, jumping, climbing, running on water, and swimming in brown basilisk lizards (Basiliscus vittatus) to examine the relationships between variation in phenotypic traits and variation in the performance of these different types of locomotion. Basiliscus vittatus is a highly dynamic performer that performs well at all of these modes of locomotion in nature, given it is terrestrial, arboreal, and aquatic. By relating phenotype to performance via the statistical model, the F-matrix, we are able to quantify these complex relationships. Our findings show that it is important to consider a wide array of tasks to comprehensively understand how trade-offs and facilitations impact the functional architecture of an organism. The F-matrix approach also allows us to predict which traits are most readily evolvable, given the system’s functional constraints.
