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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Morphological And Gene Expression Plasticity In Neotropical Cichlid Fishes, Sharon Fern Clemmensen
Morphological And Gene Expression Plasticity In Neotropical Cichlid Fishes, Sharon Fern Clemmensen
Doctoral Dissertations
Trophic divergence in cichlid fish is linked to morphological shifts in the pharyngeal jaw apparatus. For instance, in the Heroine cichlids of Central America, the ability to crush hard-shelled mollusks is a convergent phenotype with multiple evolutionary origins. These durophagous species often have very similar pharyngeal jaw morphologies associated with the pharyngeal jaw apparatus and some of these similarities could be due to phenotypically plastic responses to mechanical stress. I examined the durophagous cichlid Vieja maculicauda for differences in pharyngeal osteology, dentition, and soft tissues when exposed to different diet regimes. Here I discuss the effect on the morphology and …
Ecological Epigenetics Of Avian Range Expansions, Holly J. Kilvitis
Ecological Epigenetics Of Avian Range Expansions, Holly J. Kilvitis
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
In light of human-mediated environmental change, a fundamental goal for biologists is to determine which phenotypic characteristics enable some individuals, populations or species to be more adept at coping with such change, while rendering others more vulnerable. Studying ongoing range expansions provide a unique opportunity to address this question by allowing documentation of how novel environments shape phenotypic variation on ecological timescales. At range-edges, individuals are exposed to strong selective pressures and population genetic challenges (e.g. bottlenecks and/or founder effects), which make genetic adaptation difficult. Nevertheless, certain species, such as the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), seem to thrive in their …