Phenotypic plasticity can influence evolutionary change in a lineage, ranging from facilitation of population persistence in a novel environment to directing the patterns of evolutionary change. As the specific nature of plasticity can impact evolutionary consequences, it is essential to consider how plasticity is manifested if we are to understand the contribution of plasticity to phenotypic evolution. Most morphological traits are developmentally plastic, irreversible, and generally considered to be costly, at least when the resultant phenotype is mis-matched to the environment. At the other extreme, behavioral phenotypes are typically activational (modifiable on very short time scales), and not immediately costly as they are produced by constitutive neural networks. Although patterns of morphological and behavioral plasticity are often compared, patterns of plasticity of life history phenotypes are rarely considered. Here we review patterns of plasticity in these trait categories within and among populations, comprising the adaptive radiation of the threespine stickleback fish Gasterosteus aculeatus. We immediately found it necessary to consider the possibility of iterated development, the concept that behavioral and life history trajectories can be repeatedly reset on activational (usually behavior) or developmental (usually life history) time frames, offering fine tuning of the response to environmental context. Morphology in stickleback is primarily reset only in that developmental trajectories can be altered as environments change over the course of development. As anticipated, the boundaries between the trait categories are not clear and are likely to be linked by shared, underlying physiological and genetic systems.
Foster_etal_2015_Heredity_MorphometricsData_Fig2
Foster_etal_2015_Heredity_MorphometricsData_Fig2.txt contains the raw data, formatted for the “tps” geometric morphometric software written by F. James Rohlf at Stony Brook University. Many other morphometrics programs can read data in this format. Each entry begins with the number of landmarks for a given specimen, and the subsequent lines of data are the x,y coordinates, in pixels, of the landmarks. The x,y coordinates are followed by a photo filename associated with each specimen (available upon request). The next line represents the unique specimen ID and the final line represents the scale in pixels/cm.
Foster_etal_2015_Heredity_CVAData_Fig2
The excel file Foster_etal_2015_Heredity_CVAData_Fig2.xls contains the results of a canonical variates analysis distinguishing body shape based upon treatments. The treatments were:
BB: individuals began in a simulated benthic environment and remained in a benthic environment
BL: individuals began in a simulated benthic environment and were moved to a limnetic environment
LL: individuals began in a simulated limonite environment and were moved to a benthic environment
LB: individuals began in a simulated limnetic environment and were moved to a benthic environment
Specimen IDs in the excel file correspond to the specimen IDs in the tps morphometrics file.
Foster_etal_2015_heredity_eggcortisol_Figure4
The file “Foster_etal_2015_heredity_eggcortisol_Figure4” contains the data portrayed in Figure 4. This figure shows cortisol concentrations of 4 successive clutches extruded from female threespine stickleback. Females were either stripped of their clutches at the time of ovulation (short retention treatment) or 24 hours post-ovulation (prolonged egg retention). This file has the following 5 columns of data:
clutchnumber – this indicates the sequence number of the clutch extruded from the fish
retentiontreatment – this indicates whether the clutch was stripped from the female at the time of ovulation (short egg retention) or 24 hours post ovulation (prolonged egg retention).
population – female stickleback from two Alaskan populations were studied, both are freshwater lakes – Lynne Lake and Willow Lake.
clutchmass – clutch mass in grams
cortisol (ln pg per g clutch mass) – this indicated the natural log transformed cortisol concentration of each clutch, given is picogram per gram of clutch mass