Data from: Differences in rheotactic responses contribute to divergent habitat use between parapatric lake and stream threespine stickleback

Jiang, Yuexin, University of California, Davis, The University of Texas at Austin

Torrance, Louisa, The University of Texas at Austin

Peichel, Catherine L., Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Bolnick, Daniel I., The University of Texas at Austin

Published Jul 14, 2015 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k3836

Cite this dataset

Jiang, Yuexin; Torrance, Louisa; Peichel, Catherine L.; Bolnick, Daniel I. (2015). Data from: Differences in rheotactic responses contribute to divergent habitat use between parapatric lake and stream threespine stickleback [Dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k3836

Abstract

Migration among populations is widely thought to undermine adaptive divergence, assuming gene flow arises from random movement of individuals. If individuals instead differ in dispersal behavior, phenotype-dependent dispersal can reduce the effective rate of gene flow or even facilitae divergence. For example, parapatric populations of lake and stream stickleback tend to actively avoid dispersing into the adjoining habitat.. However, the behavioral basis of this non-random dispersal was previously unknown. Here we show that lake and stream stickleback exhibit divergent rheotactic responses (behavioral response to currents). During the breeding season, wild-caught inlet stream stickleback were better than lake fish at maintaining position in currents, faced upstream more, and spent more time in low-current areas. As a result, stream fish expended significantly less energy in currents than did lake fish. These divergent rheotactic responses likely contribute to divergent habitat use by lake and stream stickleback. Although rheotactic differences were absent in non-breeding fish, divergent behavior of breeding-season fish may suffice for assortative mating by breeding location. The resulting reproductive isolation between lake and stream fish may explain the fine-scale evolutionary differentiation in parapatric stickleback populations.

Usage notes

Jiang_Data.csv

Metadata for Jiang et al 2015 Evolution. The file Jiang_Data.csv contains all data required to recreate analyses for Jiang, Torrance, Peichel, and Bolnick 2015, Differences in Rheotactic Responses Contribute to Divergent Habitat Use Between Parapatric Lake and Stream Threespine Stickleback. Evolution. The data columns are as follows: Group: source population, Fish_ID: a unique identifier, Flow_Direction: The direction that the water pump power heads pointed to generate flow, whether or not flow was actually initiated by plugging in the power heads. That is, we assign a flow direction randomly whether or not we turned on the pumps to actually generate flow. First_trial: whether a given fish (see Fish_ID) was tested first in still or flowing water. Randomly assigned. Current: Flow presence/absence (Flow/still) for the particular trial in the data row. Group: Whether the fish was wild-caught (Field), or Lab-raised. Subgroup: Whether the fish came from near or in the inlet stream, or outlet stream. Origin: Whether the fish came from the lake or stream. Location: A categorical summary of where the fish spent most of its time in the flow tank. Distance.total: Net upstream movement. Distance.up.total: Cumulative upstream movement. Per.upstream: Percentage of time spent facing upstream. Location: Score representing the relative use of inner,middle, and outer concentric areas of the flow tank. The numbers presented here are obtained by digitizing videos of each fish (2 videos per fish, flow and still water), and converting the videos into data tables (one per fish) representing the fish’s location and orientation in ~1 second time intervals. These very large tables are available from the authors upon request: email danbolnick@austin.utexas.edu.

Location

Vancouver Island