Evol Ecol Res 15: 343-359 (2013)     Full PDF if your library subscribes.

Hendry Vineyard stickleback: testing for contemporary lake–stream divergence

Andrew P. Hendry^1,2, Aspen S. Hendry² and Cedar A. Hendry²

¹Redpath Museum and Department of Biology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada and  ²The Animal Museum, Laval, Quebec, Canada

Correspondence: A.P. Hendry, Redpath Museum and Department of Biology, McGill University, 859 Sherbrooke St. W., Montreal, Quebec H3A 0C4, Canada.
e-mail: andrew.hendry@mcgill.ca

ABSTRACT

Background: Threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) show patterns of trait divergence between habitats that are repeated across many watersheds. For example, stream stickleback generally have deeper bodies than do lake stickleback. Parallel divergence of this sort is often used to infer the power and predictability of natural selection, but how rapidly such lake–stream differences can evolve is unknown. An opportunity to address this uncertainty was provided when two reservoirs on the Hendry Vineyard in Napa, California, were constructed in the early 1970s and filled with water (and thus stickleback) from the adjacent creek.

Question: Do reservoir and creek stickleback on the Hendry Vineyard show morphological divergence typical of lake and stream stickleback?

Samples: Stickleback from the reservoirs and creek in each of two years, combined with stickleback from six lake–stream pairs on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Methods: Multivariate analyses of univariate traits and geometric morphometric variables.

Results: Reservoir and creek stickleback differed only marginally in morphology, especially compared with lake and stream stickleback from Vancouver Island. In contrast to low divergence between habitats on the Hendry Vineyard, morphological variation was very high within habitats.

Conclusions: Reservoir–creek divergence in Hendry Vineyard stickleback is seemingly constrained by a combination of weak divergent selection, high gene flow, and limited time for divergence. On the other hand, the high variation within these populations might be used to study the origins and fate of phenotypic variation.

Keywords: adaptive radiation, constraint, contemporary evolution, diversification, local adaptation, natural selection, rapid evolution, stickleback.

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