Allozymic heterozygosity and morphological variation in house sparrows
Several reports have shown that greater heterozygosity (both between individuals and between populations) is associated with lower morphological variance and asymmetry. Most previous work concerned poikilothermic organisms (for example, fish 1–3 , butterflies 4 , lizards 5 , shellfish 6–9 , salamand...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Nature (London) 1983-08, Vol.304 (5927), p.628-630 |
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Zusammenfassung: | Several reports have shown that greater heterozygosity (both between individuals and between populations) is associated with lower morphological variance and asymmetry. Most previous work concerned poikilothermic organisms (for example, fish
1–3
, butterflies
4
, lizards
5
, shellfish
6–9
, salamanders
10
and plants
11–13
). Reports concerning two homoiotherms gave conflicting results
14–16
. The report by Handford
16
on a songbird,
Zonotrichia capensis
, failed to support the relationship, although these results have been questioned in the literature
17,18
. Handford suggested that the lack of relationship in
Zonotrichia
could indicate a fundamental difference between homoiotherms and poikilotherms, reflected in their apparent differences in heterozygosity
19
. However, we report here on electrophoretic and morphometric studies
20–25
on another songbird species (
Passer domesticus
), in which the relationship appears to be upheld. We find consistently, among four locality samples, that the class of individuals of greatest allozyme heterozygosity nearly always exhibits the lowest multivariate morphological variance, and the class of greatest homozygosity nearly always exhibits the highest |
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ISSN: | 0028-0836 1476-4687 |
DOI: | 10.1038/304628a0 |