The maintenance of colour polymorphisms within populations has been a long-standing interest in evolutionary ecology. African cichlid fish contain some of the most striking known cases of this phenomenon. Intrasexual selection can be negative frequency dependent when males bias aggression towards phenotypically similar rivals, stabilizing male colour polymorphisms. We propose that where females...

Approximately 50 years ago, Nile tilapia were accidentally introduced to Brazil, and the decline of pearl cichlid populations, which has been intensified by habitat degradation, in some locations has been associated with the presence of Nile tilapia. There is, however, little strong empirical evidence for the negative interaction of non-native fish populations with native fish populations; such...

Ancient lakes are often collectively viewed as evolutionary hot spots of diversification. East Africa's Lake Tanganyika has long been the subject of scientific interest owing to dramatic levels of endemism in species as diverse as cichlid fishes, paludomid gastropods, decapod and ostracod crustaceans and poriferans. It is the largest and deepest of the African rift lakes, and its endemic fauna ...

In the colour-polymorphic Midas cichlid fish species complex (Amphilophus citrinellus spp.), gold morphs occur at much lower frequencies (< 10%) than dark individuals. This might be surprising because gold coloration is dominant and coded for by a single Mendelian locus. Furthermore, gold individuals are considered to be competitively advantaged over dark ones because they grow faster and win a...

The ∼ 500 species of the cichlid fish species flock of Lake Victoria, East Africa, have evolved in a record-setting 100 000 years and represent one of the largest adaptive radiations. We examined the population structure of the endangered cichlid species Xystichromis phytophagus from Lake Kanyaboli, a satellite lake to Lake Victoria in the Kenyan Yala wetlands. Two sets of molecular markers wer...

Species diverge eco-morphologically through the continuous action of natural selection on functionally important structures, producing alternative adaptive morphologies. In cichlid fishes, the oral and pharyngeal jaws are such key structures. Adaptive variation in jaw morphology contributes to trophic specialization, which is hypothesized to fuel their rapid speciation in the East African Great...

The cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi are famously diverse. However, phylogenetic and population genetic studies of their history have been difficult because of the great amount of genetic variation that is shared between species. We apply a recently developed method for fitting the "isolation with migration" divergence model to a data set of specially designed compound loci to develop portraits of...

Volcanic crater lakes are isolated habitats that are particularly well suited to investigating ecological and evolutionary divergence and modes of speciation. However, the mode, frequency, and timing of colonization of crater lakes have been difficult to determine. We used a statistical comparative phylogeographic approach, based on a mitochondrialDNA dataset, to infer the colonization history ...

The independent evolution of the two toothed jaws of cichlid fishes is thought to have promoted their unparalleled ecological divergence and species richness. However, dental divergence in cichlids could exhibit substantial genetic covariance and this could dictate how traits like tooth numbers evolve in different African Lakes and on their two jaws. To test this hypothesis, we used a hybrid ma...

Teeth and taste buds are iteratively patterned structures that line the oro-pharynx of vertebrates. Biologists do not fully understand how teeth and taste buds develop from undifferentiated epithelium or how variation in organ density is regulated. These organs are typically studied independently because of their separate anatomical location in mammals: teeth on the jaw margin and taste buds on...