Many-to-many mapping of phenotype to performance an extension of the F-matrix for studying functional complexity


Meeting Abstract

P1.102  Saturday, Jan. 4 15:30  Many-to-many mapping of phenotype to performance: an extension of the F-matrix for studying functional complexity MCELROY, E.J.*; BERGMANN, P.J.; College of Charleston; Clark University mcelroye@cofc.edu

An organism’s functional system is defined by the relationships between its suite of morphological traits and performance capacities. The functional system is important because it influences ecology, behavior and fitness and thus the organism’s evolutionary trajectory. How the functional system influences other aspects of the organism’s biology is determined by the type of relationships between morphology and performance. These relationships include: one-to-one, trade-offs, facilitations and redundancies. The F-matrix is an intraspecific matrix of measures of statistical association between morphology and performance that is used to quantify the type of relationships present within a functional system. However, the F-matrix is underutilized and, as such, we extend it in two ways with the goal of increasing usage. First, we use the F-matrix to describe how different morphology-performance relationships can occur simultaneously and interact to impact the evolutionary potential of a functional system; we call this many-to-many mapping. Second, we compile species’ F-matrices into an interspecific F-array and using this F-array we develop statistical methods to compare F-matrices among species. We compute an evolutionary variance-covariance matrix for each performance measure, allowing us to determine if the functional system underlying different types of performance evolved similarly. We compare morphology-performance relationships at microevolutionary and macroevolutionary levels using a modified Mantel test to compare each intraspecific F-matrix to a clade-wide F-matrix computed using the F-array and phylogenetically independent contrasts. We demonstrate the expanded F-matrix approach with a dataset of eight phrynosomatine lizard species, including seven morphological traits and two measures of locomotor performance.

the Society for
Integrative &
Comparative
Biology