The network architecture of streams and rivers constrains evolutionary, demographic and ecological processes of freshwater organisms. This consistent architecture also makes stream networks useful for testing general models of population genetic structure and the scaling of gene flow. We examined genetic structure and gene flow in the facultatively paedomorphic Idaho giant salamander, Dicamptod...

Question: How do post-glacial colonization history and current watershed geomorphology affect population genetic structure in lacustrine fish populations? Study system: Eleven populations of lacustrine threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) from a single watershed, and two adjacent marine populations of G. aculeatus as outgroups. Methods: Individuals were genotyped using six microsate...

Measures of genetic divergence have long been used to identify evolutionary processes operating within and between species. However, recent reviews have described a bias in the use of relative divergence measures towards incorrectly identifying genomic regions that are seemingly immune to introgression. Here, we present a novel and opposite bias of relative divergence measures: misidentifying r...

Elucidating the driving factors among-population divergence is an important task in evolutionary biology, however the relative contribution from natural selection and neutral genetic differentiation has been less debated. A manipulation experiment was conducted to examine whether the phenotypic divergence of Leymus chinensis depended on climate variations or genetic differentiations at 18 wild ...

The occurrence of contemporary ecotype formation through adaptive divergence of populations within the range of an invasive species typically requires standing genetic variation but can be facilitated by phenotypic plasticity. The relative contributions of both of these to adaptive trait differentiation have rarely been simultaneously quantified in recently diverging vertebrate populations. Her...

Learning processes potentially play a role in speciation but are often ignored in speciation models. Learning may, for instance, play a role when a new niche is being colonized, because the learning of niche features may cause niche-specific assortative mating and a tendency to produce young in this niche. Several animal species learn about their environmental features that may be important in ...

Parallel crosses between each of two southern (ancestral) and one northern (derived) population of the pitcher-plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii, were made to determine the genetic components of population divergence in critical photoperiod, a phenological trait that measures adaptation to seasonality along a climatic gradient. Joint scaling tests were used to analyze means and variances of firs...