Ecological Drivers of Carnivoran Body Shape Evolution
Ecological Drivers of Carnivoran Body Shape Evolution
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DOI：
10.1086/715588
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发表时间：
2021-09-01
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
Law, Chris J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Law, Chris J.
形态多样性通常被认为是对不同生态环境的适应。尽管生物学家长期以来一直假设，不同的生态环境推动着体型的进化，但这些关系很少在哺乳动物的宏观进化范围内进行测试。在这里，我测试了运动、狩猎和饮食生态影响食肉动物体型进化的假设，食肉动物是一种形态和生态多样化的哺乳动物。我发现，具有生态特征的适应性模型不能很好地预测食肉动物的体型以及导致体型变化的潜在形态成分。相反，支持最好的模型显示了基于支系的进化变化，这表明先验生态制度不能有效地捕捉到体型景观的复杂性和多样性。然而，不能排除身体形状的生态适应，因为水生和陆地食肉动物表现出相反的身体形状异速生长模式，这可能是由与这些不同环境相关的不同重力约束所驱动的。与体型相似，体型是脊椎动物形态的一个显著特征，它可能超越形态和生态特征之间的一对一映射关系，使具有不同体型的物种能够开发相似的资源，展示相似的生态环境。综上所述，这些结果表明，形态形态和生态的多维性使得很难在宏观进化尺度上理清形态进化、生态多样性和系统发育之间的复杂关系。
Morphological diversity is often attributed as adaptations to distinct ecologies. Although biologists have long hypothesized that distinct ecologies drive the evolution of body shape, these relationships are rarely tested across macroevolutionary scales in mammals. Here, I tested hypotheses that locomotor, hunting, and dietary ecologies influenced body shape evolution in carnivorans, a morphologically and ecologically diverse clade of mammals. I found that adaptive models with ecological trait regimes were poor predictors of carnivoran body shape and the underlying morphological components that contribute to body shape variation. Instead, the best-supported model exhibited clade-based evolutionary shifts, indicating that the complexity and variation of body shape landscape cannot be effectively captured by a priori ecological regimes. However, ecological adaptations of body shapes cannot be ruled out, as aquatic and terrestrial carnivorans exhibited opposite allometric patterns of body shape that may be driven by different gravitational constraints associated with these different environments. Similar to body size, body shape is a prominent feature of vertebrate morphology that may transcend one-to-one mapping relationships between morphology and ecological traits, enabling species with distinct body shapes to exploit similar resources and exhibit similar ecologies. Together, these results demonstrate that the multidimensionality of both body shape morphology and ecology makes it difficult to disentangle the complex relationship among morphological evolution, ecological diversity, and phylogeny across macroevolutionary scales.