Data from: Context dependence in complex adaptive landscapes: frequency and trait-dependent selection surfaces within an adaptive radiation of Caribbean pupfishes

The adaptive landscape provides the foundational bridge between micro- and macroevolution. One well-known caveat to this perspective is that fitness surfaces depend on ecological context, including competitor frequency, traits measured, and resource abundance. However, this view is based largely on intraspecific studies. It is still unknown how context-dependence affects the larger features of peaks and valleys on the landscape which ultimately drive speciation and adaptive radiation. Here I explore this question using one of the most complex fitness landscapes measured in the wild in a sympatric pupfish radiation endemic to San Salvador Island, Bahamas by tracking survival and growth of laboratory-reared F2 hybrids. I present new analyses of the effects of competitor frequency, dietary isotopes, and trait subsets on this fitness landscape. Contrary to expectations, decreasing competitor frequency increased survival only among very common phenotypes, whereas less common phenotypes rarely survived despite few competitors, suggesting that performance, not competitor frequency, shapes large-scale features of the fitness landscape. Dietary isotopes were weakly correlated with phenotype and growth, but did not explain additional survival variation. Nonlinear fitness surfaces varied substantially among trait subsets, revealing one-, two-, and three-peak landscapes, demonstrating the complexity of selection in the wild, even among similar functional traits.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n3mj3
PID https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:nl:ui:13-vk-feob
Metadata Access https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:easy.dans.knaw.nl:easy-dataset:94111
Provenance
Creator Martin, Christopher Herbert
Publisher Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)
Publication Year 2016
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; License: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0; http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Life Sciences; Medicine