Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118.
Integr Comp Biol. 2003 Jul;43(3):396-407. doi: 10.1093/icb/43.3.396.
Significant relationships among morphology, behavior, performance and fitness have long served as bona fide evidence for the role of selection in shaping natural populations. Here, I discuss how studies of ecological performance, or how organisms perform in nature, provide an ecological context for such selection studies. Laboratory studies assume that the level of performance expressed under "optimal" conditions accurately reflects the level of performance used in nature, but I show here that this assumption is not always borne out. A review of how various factors affect ecological performance (ontogeny, microhabitat, and macrohabitat) show that animals often express very different levels of movement speed both among different tasks, and when comparing laboratory versus field performance. Thus, a failure to take this variation into account could lead to negative, or even misleading significant fitness-character correlations. While laboratory performance studies should continue to play a key role in studies of selection, recent technological (i.e., portable high-speed cameras) and methodological developments should enable researchers to measure performance in nature to high degrees of accuracy. Thus, I encourage researchers to measure performance both in the laboratory and in the field, and thus expand the traditional paradigm of morphology → performance → fitness to morphology → ecological performance → fitness.
形态、行为、表现和适应度之间的显著关系长期以来一直被视为选择在塑造自然种群方面发挥作用的可靠证据。在这里，我将讨论如何通过研究生态表现（即生物体在自然环境中的表现）为这些选择研究提供生态背景。实验室研究假设在“最佳”条件下表现出的性能水平准确反映了在自然界中使用的性能水平，但我在这里表明，这种假设并不总是成立的。对各种因素如何影响生态表现（个体发育、微生境和小生境）的回顾表明，动物在不同任务之间以及在比较实验室与野外表现时，通常表现出非常不同的运动速度水平。因此，如果不考虑这种变化，可能会导致适应度特征相关性出现负面结果，甚至产生误导。虽然实验室性能研究应该继续在选择研究中发挥关键作用，但最近的技术（即便携式高速摄像机）和方法学的发展应该使研究人员能够以高度的准确性在自然环境中测量性能。因此，我鼓励研究人员在实验室和野外测量性能，从而将传统的形态→性能→适应度范式扩展为形态→生态性能→适应度。
