Body size evolution in otters distinguished from terrestrial mustelids

Some taxa of mammals live in water, all of which evolved from land-dwelling ancestors. In the family Mustelidae (Mammalia: Carnivora), most species live on land, while otters, comprising the subfamily Lutrinae, inhabit aquatic environments, which include the almost exclusively aquatic sea otters (Enhydra lutris). Thus, the transition from a terrestrial to an aquatic lifestyle has occurred within this family. Despite potentially different selection pressures on body size in aquatic and terrestrial habitats, no divergence in the evolutionary pattern of body size between otters and other mustelids has previously been shown using models of trait evolution on a phylogeny. We applied models that explicitly incorporated lineage-specific directional selection to the evolution of body mass in living mustelids. Using a simulation-based likelihood and approximate Bayesian computation approach, we demonstrated lineage-specific directional selection for larger body mass in otters, which is distinct ..., , , # Data from: Body size evolution in otters distinguished from terrestrial mustelids

## Code files

The codes stored in this repository were used to run Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) computations using a simulation-based likelihood. The parameters of the evolutionary models described in the article were estimated from the posterior distributions of the parameters obtained by running five independent MCMC chains. The codes were written in the C language, and the computations were performed using a MacPro (OS 10.6.7, 2 × 2.93 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon).

(1) First model directional selection_phylo1_MCMC_code.c

This file contains the code used to estimate the parameters of the first model with directional selection using the phylogenetic tree provided in the file entitled \"Phylogeny_phylo1.txt\".

The parameter descriptions displayed when this code is run are as follows:

MRCA: the trait value for the most recent common ancestor of all species, denoted as θ0 in the article.

sel: the effe...