ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
A functional trade-off between trophic adaptation and parental care predicts sexual dimorphism in cichlid fish.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- Hunting Guild Mediates the Effects of Fecundity and Mortality on Sexual Size Dimorphism in Spiders.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- An alternative pattern of head expansion during feeding in cichlids.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Transcriptome analysis reveals the sex-switching mechanism of juvenile hermaphroditism in silver pomfret (Pampus argenteus).Biology of sex differences · 2025Article
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- Sexually dimorphic eye size in dragonfishes, a response to a bioluminescent signalling gap.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Can diet niche partitioning enhance sexual dimorphism?Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Sexually mediated phenotypic variation within and between sexes as a continuum structured by ecology: The mosaic nature of skeletal variation across body regions in Threespine stickleback (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Sex and male breeding state predict intraspecific trait variation in mouth-brooding fishes.Journal of fish biology · 2022Article
- Polygenic sex determination produces modular sex polymorphism in an African cichlid fish.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Tracing evolutionary decoupling of oral and pharyngeal jaws in cichlid fishes.Evolution letters · 2021Article
- Sexual dimorphism in an adaptive radiation: Does intersexual niche differentiation result in ecological character displacement?Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Sexual dimorphism driven by intersexual resource competition: Why is it rare, and where to look for it?The Journal of animal ecology · 2021Article
- Complex sexually dimorphic traits shape the parallel evolution of a novel reproductive strategy in Sulawesi ricefishes (Adrianichthyidae).BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Gene expression dynamics during rapid organismal diversification in African cichlid fishes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Article
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- Article
- A functional trade-off between trophic adaptation and parental care predicts sexual dimorphism in cichlid fish.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although sexual dimorphism is widespread in nature, its evolutionary causes often remain elusive. Here we report a case where a sex-specific conflicting functional demand related to parental care, but not to sexual selection, explains sexual dimorphism in a primarily trophic structure, the gill rakers of cichlid fishes. More specifically, we examined gill raker length in a representative set of cichlid fish species from Lake Tanganyika featuring three different parental care strategies: (i) uni-parental mouthbrooding, whereby only one parental sex incubates the eggs in the buccal cavity; (ii) bi-parental mouthbrooding, whereby both parents participate in mouthbrooding; and (iii) nest guarding without any mouthbrooding involved. As predicted from these different parental care strategies, we find sexual dimorphism in gill raker length to be present only in uni-parental mouthbrooders, but not in bi-parental mouthbrooders nor in nest guarders. Moreover, variation in the extent of sexual dimorphism among uni-parental mouthbrooders appears to be related to trophic ecology. Overall, we present a previously unrecognized scenario for the evolution of sexual dimorphism that is not related to sexual selection or initial niche divergence between sexes. Instead, sexual dimorphism in gill raker length in uni-parental mouthbrooding cichlid fish appears to be the consequence of a sex-specific functional trade-off between a trophic function present in both sexes and a reproductive function present only in the brooding sex.
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