Figure 4: Maximum likelihood analyses of relationship between rates of body-size evolution and speciation. | Nature Communications

Figure 4: Maximum likelihood analyses of relationship between rates of body-size evolution and speciation.

From: Rates of speciation and morphological evolution are correlated across the largest vertebrate radiation

Figure 4

(a, b) Relationship between speciation rate and rate of log-transformed body size evolution, using maximum likelihood estimates of rates for 163 fish families. Shown are phylogenetic independent contrasts between the logarithm of the speciation rate and the logarithm of the rate of phenotypic evolution under two relative extinction rates (= 0.90 corresponds to an extinction rate equal to 90% of the speciation rate). (c, d) Relationship between contrasts in log-transformed phenotypic evolutionary rates and log-transformed speciation rates for sister clades only (n = 49 pairs of clades) under two relative extinction rates. All analyses indicate that these rates are positively correlated (P = 0.002; df = 1, 47). Spearman's rank correlation between these contrasts is also significant = 0: r = 0.30, P = 0.035; = 0.90: r = 0.35, P = 0.013). As contrasts are restricted to clades of identical age, this relationship is unlikely to result from the confounding effects of age on estimates of either speciation rates or rates of body size evolution.

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