Carmelo Fruciano

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Verified

Carmelo verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Catania

Understanding the processes that drive phenotypic diversification and underpin speciation is key to elucidating how biodiversity has evolved. Although these processes have been studied across a wide array of clades, adaptive radiations (ARs), which are systems with multiple closely related species and broad phenotypic diversity, have been particula...

Functional trade-offs can affect patterns of morphological and ecological evolution as well as the magnitude of morphological changes through evolutionary time. Using morpho-functional landscape modelling on the cranium of 132 carnivore species, we focused on the macroevolutionary effects of the trade-off between bite force and bite velocity. Here,...

The widespread occurrence of hybridisation in fishes suggests the need to revisit its importance for both a basic understanding of biological principles and practical ap- plications for management and conservation. Despite evidence of its pervasiveness, the phenomenon of hybridisation in fish is not uniformly studied across species and environments...

Insect pollination is fundamental for natural ecosystems and agricultural crops. The bumblebee species Bombus terrestris has become a popular choice for commercial crop pollination worldwide due to its effectiveness and ease of mass rearing. Bumblebee colonies are mass produced for the pollination of more than 20 crops and imported into over 50 cou...

Amidst a global biodiversity crisis, the word ‘biodiversity’ has become indispensable for conservation and management. Yet, biodiversity is often used as a buzzword in scientific literature. Resonant titles of papers claiming to have studied ‘global biodiversity’ may be used to promote research focused on a few taxonomic groups, habitats, or facets...

Amidst a global biodiversity crisis, the word "biodiversity" has become indispensable for practical conservation, including as a normative term. Yet, biodiversity is often used as a buzzword in scientific literature. Resonant titles promoting to have studied "global biodiversity" may then be used to oversell research that is narrow-focused on a lim...

Research on the genomics of adaptation is rapidly changing. In the last few decades, progress in this area has been driven by methodological advances, not only in the way increasingly large amounts of molecular data are generated (e.g. with high-throughput sequencing), but also in the way these data are analysed. This includes a growing appreciatio...

Factors ranging from ecological opportunity to genome composition might explain why only some lineages form adaptive radiations. While being rare, particular systems can provide natural experiments within an identical ecological setting where the factors promoting increased species numbers and phenotypic divergence in two closely related lineages i...

How the size of female yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) affects their spawning capability and fecundity is still an open and unresolved question due to the difficulties in investigating these complex effects in highly migratory pelagic marine fish species. However, this information is key to understanding the reproductive potential and resilience...

Chromosomal evolution is widely considered an important driver of speciation because it can promote the establishment of reproductive barriers. Karyotypic reorganization is also expected to affect the mean phenotype, as well as its development and patterns of phenotypic integration, through processes such as variation in genetic linkage between QTL...

In geometric morphometrics, the extent of variation attributable to non-biological causes (i.e. measurement error) is sometimes overlooked. The effects of this variation on downstream statistical analyses are also largely unknown. In particular, it is unclear whether specimen preservation induces substantial variation in shape and whether such vari...

Cichlid fishes provide textbook examples of explosive phenotypic diversification and sympatric speciation, thereby making them ideal systems for studying the molecular mechanisms underlying rapid lineage divergence. Despite the fact that gene regulation provides a critical link between diversification in gene function and speciation, many genomic r...

The mechanisms of speciation without geographic isolation (i.e., sympatric speciation) remain debated. This is due in part to the fact that the genomic landscape that could promote or hinder species divergence in the presence of gene flow is still largely unknown. However, intensive research is now centered on understanding the genetic architecture...

Kangaroos and wallabies of the Macropus complex include the largest extant marsupials and hopping mammals. They have traditionally been divided among the genus Macropus (with three subgenera: Macropus, Osphranter and Notamacropus) and the monotypic swamp wallaby, Wallabia bicolor. Recent retrotransposon and genome-scale phylogenetic analyses clarif...

Background: Recent molecular dating estimates for placental mammals echo fossil inferences for an explosive interordinal diversification, but typically place this event some 10-20 million years earlier than the Paleocene fossils, among apparently more "primitive" mammal faunas. Results: However, current models of molecular evolution do not adequ...

The Danakil Depression of northeastern Africa is among the harshest environments on Earth. Yet, despite extreme aridity, this desert region hosts the endemic cichlid genus Danakilia. As currently recognized, the genus includes at least two populations of Danakilia franchettii from groundwater springs feeding Lake Afrera (Ethiopia), one population o...

Background Advances in 3D shape capture technology have made powerful shape analyses, such as geometric morphometrics, more feasible. While the highly accurate micro-computed tomography (µCT) scanners have been the “gold standard,” recent improvements in 3D surface scanners may make this technology a faster, portable, and cost-effective alternative...

Supplementary methods for optimal use of an HD109 3D surface scanner for small biological specimens This standard operating procedures outlines the best practices for 3D scanning, which we chose after extensive trial and error.

Raw landmark coordinates produced by digitizing 3D mesh files in Viewbox This is the raw format of our shape data produced by exporting the landmark coordinates once landmarking in Viewbox was finished.

Sex identification for specimens in intra-specific analyses This table is nearly identical to Table S1 except that the “Catalogue Number” column heading is shortened to “CatNum” to ease the merging datasets. This dataset is necessary to perform the intra-specific analyses presented here.

Table of digitized points with bilateral symmetry for symmetric shape analysis of fixed landmark-only datasets This table only includes the points which are fixed landmarks and have bilateral symmetry (i.e., a symmetric pair with one point on the right side of the skull and the other point in the corresponding symmetric location on the left side of...

Catalogue numbers and sex information for all specimens Catalogue numbers are searchable in the Queensland Museum database, which also provided the sex information for the 19 delicate mouse (Pseudomys delicatulus) specimens we used in our study.

Landmark, semi-landmark curve, and patch point names and definitions There are a total of 289 points used to capture crania shape. 58 are fixed landmarks (LM): the first 12 are centrally located and the remaining 46 come in right and left pairs (right is odd, left is even in the table numbering system). 145 points were placed along 39 curves as sem...

R script for analyses presented in this study This file should be copied into R, Rstudio, or similar. All datasets required to run the analyses are contained in the supplementary information. Some analyses must be run in MorphoJ, an outside software freely available at: http://www.flywings.org.uk/morphoj_page.htm.

Table of digitized points with bilateral symmetry for symmetric shape analysis for datasets of only fixed landmarks and semi-landmark curve points This table only includes the fixed landmarks and semi-landmark curve points which have bilateral symmetry (i.e., a symmetric pair with one point on the right side of the skull and the other point in the...

Table of all digitized points with bilateral symmetry for symmetric shape analysis This table only includes the points which have bilateral symmetry (i.e., a symmetric pair with one point on the right side of the skull and the other point in the corresponding symmetric location on the left side of the skull). The numbers in the “Right” column are l...

Definitions of semilandmarks as required for sliding in geomorph during Procrustes superimposition This table simply encodes the two neighboring points that a semi-landmark can slide between. Point numbers can be related to their position on the cranium using Fig. 3 or Table S2. This table is necessary to treat sliding semi-landmarks correcting dur...

The scale‐eating cichlid fish Perissodus microlepis is a textbook example of bilateral asymmetry due to its left or right‐bending heads and of negative frequency‐dependent selection, which is proposed to maintain this stable polymorphism. The mechanisms that underlie this asymmetry remain elusive. Several studies had initially postulated a simple g...

The stable polymorphism in mouth asymmetry in the cichlid fish Perissodus microlepis is a textbook example of adaptive evolution accomplished by functionally relevant morphological changes, ecological specialization and negative frequency-dependent selection. Knowledge about the morphological and developmental basis of this stable polymorphism and...

Background. Advances in three-dimensional (3D) shape capture technology have made powerful shape analyses, such as geometric morphometrics, more feasible. While the highly accurate micro-computed tomography (μCT) scanners have been the “gold standard,” recent improvements in 3D surface scanner resolution may make this technology a faster, more port...

Background. Advances in three-dimensional (3D) shape capture technology have made powerful shape analyses, such as geometric morphometrics, more feasible. While the highly accurate micro-computed tomography (μCT) scanners have been the “gold standard,” recent improvements in 3D surface scanner resolution may make this technology a faster, more port...

The stable polymorphism in mouth asymmetry in the cichlid fish Perissodus microlepis is a textbook example of adaptive evolution accomplished by functionally relevant morphological changes, ecological specialization and negative frequency-dependent selection. Knowledge about the morphological and developmental basis of this stable polymorphism and...

Recent molecular dating estimates for placental mammals echo fossil inferences for an explosive interordinal diversification, but typically place this event some 10-20 million years earlier than the Paleocene fossils, among apparently more “primitive” mammal faunas. However, current models of molecular evolution do not adequately account for parall...

The genetic structure of Parablennius sanguinolentus from the northeastern Atlantic and Mediterranean was assessed using sequences from the mitochondrial control region (CR) and the first intron of the nuclear S7 ribosomal protein gene (S7). Our data show high genetic diversity for the central Mediterranean populations, contrasting with very low di...

Geometric morphometrics is routinely used in ecology and evolution and morphometric datasets are increasingly shared among researchers, allowing for more comprehensive studies and higher statistical power (as a consequence of increased sample size). However, sharing of morphometric data opens up the question of how much nonbiologically relevant var...

Heavy metal pollution is one of the greatest threats to the ecosystems because it degrades the habitat and is potentially toxic to wildlife and human populations. In the last few decades, bioaccumulation studies performed with a multimarker approach have been a valuable tool for the investigation of environmental and animal safety. We perform an an...

Our understanding of how biological diversity arises is limited, especially in the case of speciation in the face of gene flow. Here we investigate the genomic basis of adaptive traits, focusing on a sympatrically diverging species pair of crater lake cichlid fishes. We identify the main quantitative trait loci (QTL) for two eco-morphological trait...

Internally fertilizing animals show a remarkable diversity in male genital morphology that is associated with sexual selection, and these traits are thought to be evolving particularly rapidly. Male fish in some internally fertilizing species have “gonopodia,” highly modified anal fins that are putatively important for sexual selection. However, ou...

Cichlid fishes are an ideal model system for studying biological diversification because they provide textbook examples of rapid speciation. To date, there has been little focus on the role of gene regulation during cichlid speciation. However, in recent years, gene regulation has been recognized as a powerful force linking diversification in gene...

How polymorphisms consisting in left-right asymmetries are produced and maintained in natural populations is a tantalizing question, that remains largely unanswered. The scale-eating cichlid fish Perissodus microlepis is a remarkable example of extreme ecological specialization achieved by morphological and behavioral laterality. Its asymmetric mou...

Established empirical cases of sympatric speciation are scarce, although there is an increasing consensus that sympatric speciation might be more common than previously thought. Midas cichlid fish are one of the few substantiated cases of sympatric speciation, and they formed repeated radiations in crater lakes. In contrast, in the same environment...

Geometric morphometrics—a set of methods for the statistical analysis of shape once saluted as a revolutionary advancement in the analysis of morphology —is now mature and routinely used in ecology and evolution. However, a factor often disregarded in empirical studies is the presence and the extent of measurement error. This is potentially a very...

The Western European house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus, is well-known for the high frequency of Robertsonian fusions that have rapidly produced more than 50 karyotipic races, making it an ideal model for studying the mechanisms of chromosomal speciation. The mouse mandible is one of the traits studied most intensively to investigate the effect o...

External morphology is commonly used to identify bats as well as to investigate flight and foraging behavior, typically relying on simple length and area measures or ratios. However, geometric morphometrics is increasingly used in the biological sciences to analyse variation in shape and discriminate among species and populations. Here we compare t...

Gut bacterial communities are now known to influence a range of fitness related aspects of organisms. But how different the microbial community is in closely related species, and if these differences can be interpreted as adaptive is still unclear. In this study we compared microbial communities in two sets of closely related sympatric crater lake...

Genetic introgression of aquaculture stocks in local forms is well documented in many fish species but their evolutionary consequences for the local populations have not been thoroughly explored. Due to its wide geographical range, the existence of many locally adapted forms and the frequent occurrence of introgression of aquaculture stocks in loca...

Gut bacterial communities are now known to influence a range of fitness related aspects of organisms. But how different the microbial community is in closely related species, and if these differences can be interpreted as adaptive is still unclear. In this study we compared microbial communities in two sets of closely related sympatric crater lake...

Determining the genetic bases of adaptations and their roles in speciation are prominent issues in evolutionary biology. Cichlid fish species flocks are a prime example of recent rapid radiations often associated with adaptive phenotypic divergence from a common ancestor within a short period of time. In several radiations of freshwater fishes dive...

Adaptive phenotypic plasticity, the ability of an organism to change its phenotype to match local environments, is increasingly recognized for its contribution to evolution. However, few empirical studies have explored the molecular basis of plastic traits. The East African cichlid fish Astatoreochromis alluaudi displays adaptive phenotypic plastic...

Modularity has been suggested to be connected to evolvability because a higher degree of independence among parts allows them to evolve as separate units. Recently, the Escoufier RV coefficient has been proposed as a measure of the degree of integration between modules in multivariate morphometric datasets. However, it has been shown, using randoml...

In the present study, variation in the morphology of the lower pharyngeal element between two Sicilian populations of the rainbow wrasse Coris julis has been explored by the means of traditional morphometrics for size and geometric morphometrics for shape. Despite close geographical distance and probable high genetic flow between the populations, s...

The possible differences between sexes in patterns of morphological variation in geographical space have been explored only in gonochorist freshwater species. We explored patterns of body shape variation in geographical space in a marine sequential hermaphrodite species, Coris julis (L. 1758), analyzing variation both within and between colour phas...

Protogynous sequential hermaphroditism is very common in marine fish. Despite a large number of studies on various aspects of sequential hermaphroditism in fish, the relationship between body shape and colour during growth in dichromatic species has not been assessed. Using geometric morphometrics, the present study explores the relationship betwee...

Sequence variation in the mitochondrial control region was studied in the Mediterranean rainbow wrasse (Coris julis), a species with pronounced pelagic larval phase inhabiting the Mediterranean Sea and the adjacent coastal eastern Atlantic Ocean. A total of 309 specimens from 19 sampling sites were analysed with the aim of elucidating patterns of m...

The microstructure of the anterior region of the scales in several species of the genus Aphanius was studied by SEM with the aim of determining whether scale morphology could be used to discriminate between the species of this genus. The characters examined concern the morphology of lepidonts, or “scale‐teeth”, their distribution and mode of implan...