CORBIN, Clay E; Bloomsburg University: Ecomorphological Concordance in North American and South African Flycatcher Communities

In both the Old and New Worlds, independent clades of sit-and-wait insectivorous birds have evolved. These independent radiations provide an excellent opportunity to test whether the relationships between morphology and ecology are concordant. First, with canonical correlation analysis, I test whether there is a significant relationship between ecology and morphology in North American (NA) and Southern African (SA) flycatcher communities. Second, using multivariate characterizations (Principal components and reciprocal averaging) of morphological traits and foraging behavior, I test, using ANCOVA whether the ecomorphological relationship is dependent upon locality after taking morphological differences into account. Also, I accounted for phylogenetic relationships among the species in the two communities to see if observed patters were consistent with an adaptive explanation of the form-function relationships. I found that morphology predicted the foraging behavior in both NA and SA flycatchers. Also, the results of the ANCOVA showed that these communities are concordant with respect to the ecomorphological relationships. Also, the phylogenetic relationships among the species did not seem to influence the patterns seen in these data. Hence the ecomorphological relationships are adaptive and common to both communities of flycatchers. However, the relationships between ecology and morphology (explained variances) are not as tight as one may predict. This may be due to differences in habitat or broad scale historical influences between NA and SA flycatchers.