The overall objective of this thesis was to understand better the mechanisms that shape the diversity in colour vision of fish, and to explore the adaptive significance of this divergence. Among the vertebrates, teleost ...

An organism’s entire life history - the timing of development, reproduction, senescence and death - can depend on the nature of selection for reproductive age. The outcome of selection will depend both on the particular ...

The advent of next-generation sequencing has significantly reduced the cost of obtaining large-scale genetic resources, opening the door for genomic studies of non-model but ecologically interesting species. The shift in ...

Successful preservation of Earth’s biodiversity requires an understanding of the processes that generate new species. The generation of species without gene exchange is considered predominant; however, a growing body of ...

Every species has a limit to its geographic distribution. The problem is that we don’t really know why. Classical explanations propose that range limits occur where the ecological conditions overwhelm adaptation and ...

South America and the Andes harbour a rich biodiversity. High levels of in-situ speciation, survival of relict lineages into modern times, and mixing of biotas (Gondwanian and North American), have been demonstrated to ...

Understanding the environmental, demographic, and evolutionary processes underlying species’ range limits (RLs) is a primary goal of ecology, and increasingly important for conservation in a world of changing species ...

The ability of individuals to change breeding time is predicted to be an important aspect of adapting to climate change. Changes in breeding time could occur through either behavioural adjustment of breeding time or ...

Understanding the trade-offs that affect potentially adaptive traits is fundamental to our understanding of evolutionary diversification and speciation. Heterogeneous landscapes may lead to spatial variation in such traits ...

All species have limits to their geographic distributions and many range limits are stable over centuries, indicating a failure to adapt to conditions beyond the range edge. This simple observation contradicts copious ...