Abstract Ecological opportunity is considered a main driver of adaptive diversification. Colonization of new areas and habitats provides novel opportunities, which may lead to phenotypic change and rapid diversification. The geographically isolated island Sulawesi in Indonesia hosts numerous endemic radiations. The ricefish family Adrianichthyidae is the most speciose of the few exclusively freshwater-dwelling fish lineages that colonized the tropical island. While the family’s distribution includes large parts of…

Abstract Transitions from no parental care to extensive care are costly and involve major changes in life history, behavior, and morphology. Nevertheless, in Sulawesi ricefishes, pelvic brooding evolved from transfer brooding in two distantly related lineages within the genera Adrianichthys and Oryzias, respectively. Females of pelvic brooding species carry their eggs attached to their belly until the fry hatches. Despite their phylogenetic distance, both pelvic brooding lineages share a set of external morphologi…

Abstract Geometric morphometrics (GM) enable the quantification of morphological variation on various scales. Recent technical advances allow analyzing complex three‐dimensional shapes also in cases where landmark‐based approaches are not appropriate. Pelvic girdle bones (basipterygia) of Sulawesi ricefishes are 3D structures that challenge traditional morphometrics. We hypothesize that the pelvic girdle of ricefishes experienced sex‐biased selection pressures in species where females provide brood care by carryin…

Identification and masking of repetitive elements in the genome sequence of <em>O. dopingdopingensis </em>was performed with the following bioinformatic tool case. Nucleotides were masked using the DUST algorithm with dustmasker (version 1.0.0, part of blast+ 2.9.0 (Altschul et al., 1990; Camacho et al., 2009) (Kuzio et al., unpublished but described in (Morgulis et al., 2006). Tandem Repeats were identified with Tandem Repeat Finder (trf version 4.09) (Benson, 1999). A species-specific <em>de novo</em> repeat lib…

Ortholog set We generated a reference set consisting of 8390 single-copy protein-coding genes derived from OrthoDB v.9.1 (Waterhouse et al., 2013) available for the following species: <em>Austrofundulus limnaeus, Centrocoris variegatus, Fundulus heteroclitus, Kryptolebias marmoratus, Nothobranchius furzeri, Oryzias latipes, O. melastigma, Poecilia formosa, P. latipinna ,P. mexicana, P. reticulata</em> and <em>Xiphophorus maculatus </em>(NCBI Accession numbers in Table S7). The hierarchical split was set to Actinop…