Abstract
Environmental differences can lead to morphologically different subpopulations. The scale of the mosaic of morphologies should help shed light on the nature of the mechanisms at work. Previous work has shown that jewelwing damselflies have different wing sizes in different types of habitat. Our aim was to (1) describe the relationship between damselfly wing lengths and a gradient of forest fragmentation and (2) determine the spatial scale at which these morphological differences occur. We hypothesized that local adaptation would lead to differences in wing morphology over short distances. We herein test one of the several predictions that would need to be met to support this hypothesis: that wing morphology would show spatial autocorrelation at relatively short distances. We further predicted that the wing morphology would correlate to forest fragmentation. We collected jewelwing damselflies from across Indiana, USA, in habitats across a gradient of forest fragmentation. We examined the link between forest edge density and wing length using three biologically relevant landscape sizes. We then examined the distance to which wing length variation was autocorrelated using Moran’s I. We found positive linear or unimodal relationships between wing length and edge density, in both males and females, at all three landscape scales. Spatial autocorrelation in wing length indicated that variation in wing length was autocorrelated at short distances, out to 1–5 km. Our findings uphold one of the predictions stemming from the hypothesis that adaptations to local environments—habitat fragmentation here—can occur at relatively fine spatial scales.
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Availability of data and materials
Histograms of CRW data are available in the online Appendix A. Data is available upon request from the corresponding author.
Code availability
R code for the CRW is available upon request from the corresponding author.
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Funding
During this research, JTG was funded by NSF DRL award #1513248 and JDH was funded by a USDA Hatch grant.
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JTG selected the research question, conducted the field work, laboratory work, and analysis, and wrote the paper. JDH refined the research question, helped design the field work, analysis, and result interpretation, and edited the writing.
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Communicated by Wolf M. Mooij.
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Goldner, J.T., Holland, J.D. Wing morphology of a damselfly exhibits local variation in response to forest fragmentation. Oecologia 202, 369–380 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05396-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05396-9