Hello All,
Attached is a PDF of a paper from our group that examines the evolution of darter egg-deposition behavior and the origins of parental care in the lineage. The basis of the analyses is the darter phylogeny we published last year is Systematic Biology. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Tom

Hmmmm.... I am using courtship strategies as a way of generating community hypotheses, perhaps I should consider egg deposition as well. Looking forward to reading this.

Todd

Todd, I think that is a great idea. Ben and I had kicked around the pattern of not finding any egg-guarding Nothonotus species in sympatry; however, they are a young clade and young lineages of NA fishes tend to have strict allopatric distributions, well most lineages...

Currently I'm more interested in general ecological theory, and so I am tying this into frequency distributions across the landscape (specialists vs generalists) with the same potential pool of species. I was teetering on using this as a third dimension, this encourages me to use this as another "character". Egg size and mouth orientation were others I considered, but sound like work for later.

It was also ideal as most of my community is covered by the Winn paper and then a couple others from the golden age of natural history. It was fun pouring through the old school papers. We lost something when we all got into a big damned hurry.

Todd

I've encountered some other possible dimensions of what shapes darter distributions. We've found that snubnose darters in our area have surprisingly few gill parasites, while others in the same communities will have much higher infestations, especially stripetail and fantail darters. And preferences for depth and current velocity are of course biggies, with snubnoses in shallow, slower waters and others like redlines and greensides going for velocity and depth, respectively. Two students in our program are defending theses next week, after which I'll feel freer about posting some figures from their work on these subjects. All of this work is from the Flint and Paint Rock rivers in NE Alabama.