ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Evolutionary determinism and convergence associated with water-column transitions in marine fishes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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19 citing papers in PubMed, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- Selection, constraints, and contingency drive mosaic patterns of evolution during the carangarian adaptive radiation.Science advances · 2026Article
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- Ecological and genomic signatures of the convergent evolution of planktivory in fossil and living reef fishes over deep time.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The rise and fall of the world's greatest marine biodiversity hotspot.Science advances · 2026Article
- Rapid and repeated evolution of pigmentation patterns in reef fishes.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Convergent reduction in skeletal density during benthic to pelagic transitions in Baikal sculpins.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Parallel Reduction in Skeletal Density During Benthic to Pelagic Transitions in Baikal Sculpins.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Ecological interactions and genomic innovation fueled the evolution of ray-finned fish endothermy.Science advances · 2025Article
- Reduced evolutionary constraint accompanies ongoing radiation in deep-sea anglerfishes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Ecological diversification of sea catfishes is accompanied by genome-wide signatures of positive selection.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The rise of dietary diversity in coral reef fishes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Genetic mechanism of body size variation in groupers: Insights from phylotranscriptomics.Zoological research · 2024Article
- Diversity in the internal functional feeding elements of sympatric morphs of Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus).PloS one · 2024Article
- The first articulated skeletons of enigmatic Late Cretaceous billfish-like actinopterygians.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Phylogenetic structure of body shape in a diverse inland ichthyofauna.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Impact of Phylogenetic Tree Completeness and Mis-specification of Sampling Fractions on Trait Dependent Diversification Models.Systematic biology · 2023Article
- The impact of paleoclimatic changes on body size evolution in marine fishes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Detecting (non)parallel evolution in multidimensional spaces: angles, correlations and eigenanalysis.Biology letters · 2022Review
- Patterns of Body Shape Diversity and Evolution in Intertidal and Subtidal Lineages of Combtooth Blennies (Blenniidae).Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2021Article
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14 authors at 8 institutions in 4 countries.
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Abstract
Repeatable, convergent outcomes are prima facie evidence for determinism in evolutionary processes. Among fishes, well-known examples include microevolutionary habitat transitions into the water column, where freshwater populations (e.g., sticklebacks, cichlids, and whitefishes) recurrently diverge toward slender-bodied pelagic forms and deep-bodied benthic forms. However, the consequences of such processes at deeper macroevolutionary scales in the marine environment are less clear. We applied a phylogenomics-based integrative, comparative approach to test hypotheses about the scope and strength of convergence in a marine fish clade with a worldwide distribution (snappers and fusiliers, family Lutjanidae) featuring multiple water-column transitions over the past 45 million years. We collected genome-wide exon data for 110 (∼80%) species in the group and aggregated data layers for body shape, habitat occupancy, geographic distribution, and paleontological and geological information. We also implemented approaches using genomic subsets to account for phylogenetic uncertainty in comparative analyses. Our results show independent incursions into the water column by ancestral benthic lineages in all major oceanic basins. These evolutionary transitions are persistently associated with convergent phenotypes, where deep-bodied benthic forms with truncate caudal fins repeatedly evolve into slender midwater species with furcate caudal fins. Lineage diversification and transition dynamics vary asymmetrically between habitats, with benthic lineages diversifying faster and colonizing midwater habitats more often than the reverse. Convergent ecological and functional phenotypes along the benthic-pelagic axis are pervasive among different lineages and across vastly different evolutionary scales, achieving predictable high-fitness solutions for similar environmental challenges, ultimately demonstrating strong determinism in fish body-shape evolution.
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