Weak phylogenetic effects on ecological niches of Sylvia warblers

To understand the evolution of ecological niches it is important to know whether niche evolution is constrained by phylogeny. We approached this question for Sylvia warblers by testing if closely related species are more similar in 20 ecologically relevant morphological traits than distantly related species. Phylogenetic relatedness was quantified using a molecular phylogeny based on the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. By Principal Component Analysis (PCA) two major niche axes were extracted. We tested the individual ecomorphological traits and the positions of the species on the PCA axes for phylogenetic effects using Mantel tests. The results demonstrated small but significant phylogenet…