Tracing functional adaptation in African cichlid fishes through morphometric analysis of fossil teeth: exploring the methods

Abstract The sedimentary archive of Crater Lake Challa in East Africa contains abundant fossil teeth of cichlid fishes throughout at least the last 25,000 years. Here, we use morphometric analyses of oral teeth from the two extant Oreochromis species inhabiting Lake Challa to explore the feasibility of tracing adaptive modification of the cichlid trophic apparatus in the lake’s fossil record. We compared the performance of semi-landmark analysis (SLM) and elliptic Fourier analysis in capturing morphological variation in oral tooth crowns, and found that SLM, supplemented with tooth shaft measurements, ensured consistency with whole-body landmark analyses. Whole-body and tooth morphology data both allowed to discern between the indigenous Oreochromis hunteri and the recently introduced Oreochromis korogwe. Both species have an oral jaw arrangement of outer-row bicuspid and inner-rows tricuspid teeth, but O. hunteri has generally more slender teeth with a proportionally taller major cusp than O. korogwe, suggesting fine-scaled resource partitioning. Exploratory analysis of three fossil samples showed that the major tooth types of modern-day Oreochromis are also represented in the fossil record. Their total morphological variation is largely restricted to the morphospace occupied by contemporary teeth, suggesting a close functional relationship between ancient populations and their likely descendant, O. hunteri.