Posted 09 April 2013 - 09:02 PM
Actually, I think it's pretty impressive that we found a good, reliable separation on those few meristics. When you look at somespecies within Etheostomatinae they were diagnosed based on many more counts involving the ratios of each dorsal fin spine height and other ray/spine ratio stats. The fact that we could find such an easy combination of characters that aligned with the DNA was great. If we 'amped up' the meristic data collection to mirror some of those in the 50's to 80's, we probably could have found even more agreement between the meristics and DNA.