Evolutionary history has been recognized as an important factor in studying ecological communities. Lake fish communities have had limited consideration from a community phylogenetics perspective and present the opportunity to include trophic interactions in the analysis. For the species under study, I used known phylogenies from the literature and genetic information to determine relative branch lengths and phylogenetic relationships by Bayesian inference. Using the resultant phylogenetic tree and fish community data, the phylogenetic community structure was determined for the lakes in the Manitoulin Island and LaCloche regions of Ontario, Canada. Evidence of phylogenetic structuring was found, particularly associated with piscivory, winter hypoxia tolerance, and thermal preferences for deep coldwater lakes. Although the majority of the lakes were weakly structured from a phylogenetic perspective, significant trends were nonetheless apparent; especially when further informed by examining species-specific trends, demonstrating that evolutionary history can play a role in structuring freshwater fish communities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/42822 |
| Date | 22 November 2013 |
| Creators | Doyle, Bradley |
| Contributors | Jackson, Donald Andrew |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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