Distinct evolutionary signatures underlie body shape diversity across deep-sea habitats

The deep sea is known for extreme biological conditions such as high pressure, little to no solar light, and cold temperatures. Despite these challenges, deep-sea fishes have been shown to have higher body shape diversity than shallow-sea relatives. An open question is whether different habitats within the deep sea differentially contribute to this surprising phenotypic diversity. Here, we explore the joint effects of two major environmental dimensions in marine ecosystems, the benthic-pelagic axis and ocean depth, on phenotypic diversification in teleost fishes. Using measurements of body shape across nearly 3,000 species, we found that increasing ocean depth generally shifted axes of phenotypic evolution and promoted diversification for benthic, demersal, and pelagic fishes alike. However, body shape diversity and rates of body shape evolution did not scale evenly across these habitat divisions. For benthic fishes, the rate increased more strongly than diversity with ocean depth, whil..., , # Distinct evolutionary signatures underlie body shape diversity across deep-sea habitats

Dryad DOI: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z612jm6r1

Main file: dryad_package_Oct_14_2025.zip

Dryad package prepared by Elizabeth Santos (neé Miller) on October 14, 2025

Contact with questions: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

R scripts are designed to work with the R project \"comp_methods.Rproj.\" Open this file first!

This R project keeps all folders within a common directory so the scripts can all \"talk\" to each other

## Description of files:

#### Folder \"data\"

contains input files needed to run all analyses

**\"pruned_rab.tre\"** is a newick-formatted time-calibrated phylogenetic tree originally published by Rabosky et al. 2018, with taxa pruned to match sampling of marine species with body shape data (see Table S2).

**\"size_corrected_morph_withcombined_hab_cats.csv\"** contains body shape variables and habitat data that are input into all analyses.

* column B \"...,