Armor morphology and reproductive output in threespine stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus

Synopsis

The threespine stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus, is an extensively armored fish inhabiting both marine and fresh waters across its holarctic distribution. Marine fish nearly always possess a full complement of bony lateral plates running from just behind the head to the tail, and a robust pelvic girdle complex. These armor features appear to constrain lateral and ventral abdominal distention, and therefore clutch volume. Freshwater populations in many areas exhibit variable reduction in lateral plate number, and in some regions the pelvic girdle is also reduced or lost. Freshwater populations also vary in the degree of abdominal distention exhibited by gravid females. We tested whether reduction in armoring might be correlated with increased clutch volume using five populations from the Cook Inlet area of Alaska. The hypothesis that populations having reduced pelvic girdle complexes would have greater size-adjusted clutch volumes was not supported. In fact, our two full-pelvic populations as a group had larger volumes. Similarly, size-adjusted clutch volumes were not related to pelvic phenotype within either of our two pelvic-reduced populations, nor to lateral plate morph within a fifth population. Other factors that may explain the interpopulation differences in clutch volume in threespine stickleback include body shape, food quantity and quality, intensity of predation, and even behavior. Except for a preliminary analysis of body shape, these possibilities remain unexplored. The concept of phenotypic integration suggests that these factors should be analyzed as a suite rather than individually.