Understanding how a monophyletic lineage of a species diverges into several adaptive forms has received increased attention in recent years, but the underlying mechanisms in this process are still under debate. Postglacial fishes are excellent model organisms for exploring this process, especially the initial stages of ecological speciation, as postglacial lakes represent replicated discrete ...

Natural populations often vary in their degree of ecological, morphological and genetic divergence. This variation can be arranged along an ecological speciation continuum of increasingly discrete variation, with high inter-individual variation at one end and well defined species in the other. In postglacial fishes, evolutionary divergence has commonly resulted in the co-occurrence of a pelagic and ...

In adaptive radiations, ecological opportunity (i.e. niche availability) is considered to be an important driver to increase phenotypic variation, but diversity may also be constrained by historical factors related to colonization events. How do ecological opportunity and post-glacial colonization history affect the phenotypic diversity in a young species lineage? We quantified phenotypic diversity ...

Morphological divergence was evident among three sympatric morphs of Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus (L.)) that are ecologically diverged along the shallow-, deep-water resource axis in a subarctic postglacial lake (Norway). The two deep-water (profundal) spawning morphs, a benthivore (PB-morph) and a piscivore (PP-morph), have evolved under identical abiotic conditions with constant low light ...

A study of body and head development in three sympatric reproductively isolated Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus (L.)) morphs from a subarctic lake (Skogsfjordvatn, northern Norway) revealed allometric trajectories that resulted in morphological differences. The three morphs were ecologically assigned to a littoral omnivore, a profundal benthivore and a profundal piscivore, and this was confirmed ...

Benthic invertebrate communities play a fundamental role in lake ecosystems, and the understanding of how those benthic communities are structured, particularly in terms of the identity and spatiotemporal distribution of their functional traits, is key to our understanding of how lake ecosystems work. In Takvatn, a subarctic lake in northern Norway, we identified the taxonomic and functional identity ...

The trophic niches of Arctic charr and brown trout differ when the species occur in sympatry . Their trophically transmitted parasit es are expected to reflect these differences. Here , we investigate how the infections of Diphyllobothrium dendriticum and Diphyllobothrium ditremum differ between charr and trout. These tapeworms use copepods ...

To identify trematode diversity and life-cycles in the sub-Arctic Lake Takvatn, Norway, we characterised 120 trematode isolates from mollusc first intermediate hosts, metacercariae from second intermediate host fishes and invertebrates, and adults from fish and invertebrate definitive hosts, using molecular techniques. Phylogenies based on nuclear and/or mtDNA revealed high species richness (24 ...

Parallel phenotypic evolution occurs when independent populations evolve similar traits in response to similar selective regimes. However, populations inhabiting similar environments also frequently show some phenotypic differences that result from non-parallel evolution. In this study, we quantified the relative importance of parallel evolution to similar foraging regimes and nonparallel lake-specific ...

Gill raker divergence is a general pattern in adaptive radiations of postglacial fish, but few studies have addressed the adaptive significance of this morphological trait in foraging and eco-evolutionary interactions among predator and prey. Here, a set of subarctic lakes along a diversifying gradient of coregonids was used as the natural setting to explore correlations between gill raker numbers ...