Meeting Abstract
Biologists are drawn to the most extraordinary adaptations in the natural world, i.e. evolutionary novelties, yet rarely do we understand the microevolutionary processes underlying the origins of novel traits, behaviors, or ecological niches. Here I discuss insights gained into the origins of novelty from my research program over the past decade on Caribbean pupfishes, spanning biological levels of organization from genotype to fitness landscape. I focus on a case study of the origins of novel trophic specialists on San Salvador Island, a sympatric radiation including the endemic scale-eating and mollusk-eating specialist pupfishes. I highlight questions that can be addressed about the origins of novelty at different biological levels, including the contributions of ecological opportunity, the isolation of novel phenotypes on the fitness landscape, the spatiotemporal origins of adaptive variation contributing to novelty, gene misregulation due to adaptive divergence, and form-function relationships for novel traits. Evolutionary novelties are rare, almost by definition, yet integrative case studies can provide insights into this rarity relative to more common adaptations, such as the relative isolation of novel phenotypes on fitness landscapes and the transient availability of ecological, genetic, and behavioral opportunities for novelty.
