Evidence of Countergradient Variation in Growth of Spotted Gars from Core and Peripheral Populations

摘要: AbstractPeripheral populations occupy the edge of a species' range and may exhibit adaptations to potentially “harsher” marginal environments compared with core populations. The peripheral population Spotted Gar Lepisosteus oculatus in Great Lakes basin represents northern is completely disjunct from Mississippi River population. Age-0 Gars experience growing season approximately half that but reach similar sizes by winter, suggesting potential for countergradient variation growth, i.e. an evolutionary response environmental gradient such as latitude compensate usual phenotypic effect gradient. In this study we used two common garden experiments investigate growth young-of-year comparison those Our first experiment showed envir...