Is intraspecific variation in diet and morphology related to environmental gradients? Exploring Liem's paradox in a cichlid fish
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interspecific studies have demonstrated that trophic morphology and ecology are not always tightly matched: a phenomenon rarely reported at the intraspecific level. In the present study, we explored relationships among diet, morphology and the environment in a widespread cichlid fish, Astatoreochromis alluaudi (Pellegrin 1904), from 6 sites in southern Uganda to test for evidence of eco-morphological matching at the interdemic level. Previous studies of Astatoreochromis alluaudi have demonstrated developmental plasticity in trophic morphology in response to diet: a mollusk diet produces specimens with large pharyngeal jaws and muscles, whereas a soft-food diet produces smaller pharyngeal jaws and corresponding changes in musculature. Sites were chosen to maximize variability in environmental variables that might directly or indirectly affect trophic morphology. We found significant differences in pharyngeal jaw and muscle morphology among populations. Similarly, we found differences in diets among sites: mollusks were found in the stomachs of fish from only 2 populations sampled, despite the presence of mollusks in 5 of the 6 sites. Although trophic morphology did match the observed diet in 2 sites, diet did not correlate with either morphology or environmental variables across sites, nor were environmental variables correlated with morphological variation among sites. These results suggest that mismatch can occur among different populations of a single species for reasons such as seasonality in resources, developmental plasticity and/or complex indirect interactions. Intraspecific mechanisms should be further studied in order to better understand the complex relationships between morphological specialization and ecological generalization.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it