How do species emerge?

It is not individual traits that survive, reproduce and die, but whole individuals. Selection on one trait can generate a response to selection in others. This evolutionary constraint is imposed by heredity, physiology or natural selection and can limit adaptation by channeling evolution in the direction of least genetic resistance characterized by abundant phenotypic variability. But if constraint only channels adaptation down predictable paths, how do new species break away from their ancestors to forge distinct eco-evolutionary roles? Despite Simpson's "choppy sea" metaphor of a dynamic adaptive landscape, the location and topology of fitness peaks are ubiquitously assumed constant. The goal of this PhD is to track how morphological variance-covariance matrices differ during the emergence of new species, searching for "tipping points" 1 in the dynamics of speciation to fill the empirical evidence gap of how evolutionary constraints change during the emergence of new species. This project brings together comparative analytical techniques developed on ERC funded research in Goswami's group 2 with data gathered on NERC funded research in Ezard's research group.