Meeting Abstract

2.1  Tuesday, Jan. 4  Coral Reefs promote the evolution of morphological diversity and ecological novelty in labrid fishes PRICE, Samantha A*; HOLZMAN, Roi A; NEAR, Thomas J; WAINWRIGHT, Peter C; Univ. of California, Davis; Univ. of Tel-Aviv; Yale University; Univ. of California, Davis saprice@ucdavis.edu

Although coral reefs are renowned biodiversity hotspots it is not known whether they also promote the evolution of exceptional ecomorphological diversity. We investigated this question by analyzing a large functional morphological dataset of trophic characters within Labridae, a highly diverse family of fishes. We calculated the rates of morphological evolution in reef and non-reef species using an evolutionary-informed analysis that accounts for species relationships, the time available for diversification and different ancestral state reconstructions of reef living. Ecological novelty was quantified as the percentage of labrid morphospace that was unique to each habitat and number of distinctive dietary strategies that evolved in each environment. Our results suggest that coral reef habitats promote the evolution of both trophic novelty and morphological diversity within fishes. We show that coral reef species evolve functional morphological diversity at 3-times the rate of species in other tropical environments. In addition coral reef species occupy 65% more trophic morphospace than non-reef species. Thus within labrids, the morphological diversity on coral reefs is at least partially due to the occupation of novel regions of morphospace. However, when species with novel feeding ecologies were omitted from the analysis, reef lineages still showed faster morphological diversification. These results are perhaps driven by the many unique prey items endemic to coral reefs and imply that habitat complexity, in terms of the physical and biological diversity, can actually elevate rates of morphological evolution within trophic structures.