Data from: Quantifying adaptive divergence of the snowfinches in a common landscape

Aim: Species living in a shared environment face similar selective
pressures and often evolve adaptive divergence to avoid competition.
Quantifying phenotypic divergence and its genetic parallelism among
sympatric species is important for understanding of ecologically moderated
biodiversity. Here we integrate ecologic, phenotypic and genomic datasets
to study to what extent three sympatrically snowfinches (Montifringilla
adamsi, Pyrgilauda ruficollis and Onychostruthus taczanowskii) differ in
their adaptations in order to co-exist in a shared environment. Location:
Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau Methods: We used principal component analysis to
summarize and compare environmental and phenotypic divergence. We compared
phenotypes relevant to body and beak sizes (n=68) because they are
indicators of niche and food segregation, thus critical for establishing
co-existence of sympatric birds. We used comparative genomics (n=33) to
identify genetic loci that are highly divergent between species as well as
loci unique for each of species. Using vector analyses, we integrated
correlation and permutation to quantify parallelism between phenotypic and
genetic divergences. Results: We found that body and beak sizes are
significantly different among three snowfinches. The phenotypic
differentiations are greater in species that share similar ecological
conditions than in those that do not. We showed that genes related to
developmental process are over-represented within highly divergent genomic
regions and unique genetic loci of each species. We found that the extent
of phenotypic divergence between snowfinch pairs is more strongly
correlated with the magnitude of divergence in developmental genes than in
the whole-genome. Main Conclusions: Adaptive divergence of sympatric
snowfinches is highly constrained on developmental genes. As this genetic
divergence is strongly correlated with divergence of the traits related to
segregation in niche and food resources, this correlation reflects either
causal effects or indirect consequences of ecological mediated changes.
Our study provides novel insights into the mechanisms underlying
evolutionary versatility and ecological success among sympatric species.