Scale dependent niche conservatism found in a lake fish
community
Tingyue Yang1,2, Lan Zhu1,2, Dan
Yu1, Chunling Wang1, Qinghua
Cai1, Huanzhang Liu1*
1 The Key Laboratory of Aquatic Biodiversity and
Conservation, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Wuhan 430072, China.
2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing,
China
*Correspondence: Huanzhang Liu, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China. E-mail:
hzliu@ihb.ac.cn
AUTHORSHIP STATEMENT: HL conceived this study. HL and TY wrote the first
draft of the manuscript with contributions from DY. TY carried out the
experiment with the help of CW. TY, LZ and QC contributed to data
analyses. All authors approved the manuscript for submission.
Abstract: Investigations to niche evolution have received
controversial results in recent times, leading to some confusions in
ecological studies: competitive exclusion principle (CEP) predicts that
closely related species should be adequately divergent; while niche
conservatism (NC) predicts that closely related species should be
ecologically most similar. In the present study, by using stable isotope
to signify trophic niche, we analyzed niche divergences of 57 fishes
from a lake (Poyang Lake, central
China) at the phylogenetic scale, as well as niche divergences and
overlaps of 7 fishes (same subfamliy) at 5 sites of this lake, and
comprehensively investigated the concepts of NC and competitive
exclusion principle (CEP). The results showed that, NC exists on a large
scale (trophic differences showing positive relationships with genetic
distances), but not at the local scale (sister species showing larger
differences than closely related species, and almost no trophic
overlap), where the CEP works better. Besides, trophic convergence was
also found between some very distantly related species, leading to the
possible limited divergence. We believe these findings will contribute
to future theoretical and empirical niche explorations.