Presentation Detail

Biogeography

Owens, Hannah L [1].

A Phylogentic Approach to Niche Evolution in Gadine Fishes.

Fishes of the subfamily Gadinae are distributed throughout the Arctic, northern Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and Mediterranean Sea. Gadine fishes occupy niches ranging from the temperate benthos of the continental shelf to the edges of Arctic sea ice. The rapidly-growing body of ecological niche evolution literature suggests that while niche is conserved among closely-related lineages at relatively short timescales, the pattern breaks down through deeper time. Given the diversity of habitats gadine fishes occupy and the wealth of available information about the group, they present an ideal system for the first study of the evolution of ecological niche in fishes employing ecological niche modeling and ancestral state reconstruction. Occurrence data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility database and several museums, in combination with environmental data from NOAA's World Ocean Atlas 2009 were used to generate ecological niche models using Maxent. For each species, the resulting distributions were used to calculate predicted niche occupancy (PNO) profiles, a measure of where a species can be found in multimodal ecological parameter space. A phylogenetic tree was developed for Gadinae using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences. PNOs were then plotted as characters onto the tree to demonstrate how niche occupancy among gadine lineages has evolved. My results indicate that while ecological niche preferences for cool, low salinity waters are largely conserved among Gadinae, some species have diversified into other regions of ecological niche space. Niche reconstructions suggest an origin for the clade that was warmer and more saline than waters currently occupied by most species.

1 - University of Kansas, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 1345 Jawhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS, 66046, USA

Keywords:
Gadinae
Marine fish
Ecological Niche Model
ancestral state reconstruction
biogeography.

Presentation Type: Regular Oral Presentation
Session: 69
Location: Peruvian A/Snowbird Center
Date: Sunday, June 23rd, 2013
Time: 10:30 AM
Number: 69001
Abstract ID:485
Candidate for Awards:W.D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Student Presentation