Consistent with the genetic variation, our morphological analysis revealed that the majority of morphological traits show significant mean differences between specimens from northern Africa, the eastern Mediterranean coast, and Turkey/Iran, suggesting lineage-specific trait evolution.
However, Price (1989) considered it highly artificial to divide the family on the basis of shoot dimorphism alone, with which other morphological traits show little concordance.
In the evolutionary model species Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, various morphological and physiological traits showed higher heritability and greater variance under less benign circumstances40, yet the processes outside the laboratory might be more complex and the effects of stress may not universally increase phenotypic variation41,42.
Analysis of chemical deterrence in context with morphological defenses and growth-related traits showed that native and exotic plants had similar trade-offs among traits.
PCA of the morphological trait values showed a distribution pattern confirming the correlation results shown in Table 1 (data not shown).
Due to its mix of morphological traits that show intermediate stages between the slow-moving smaller sloth lemurs and the suspensory large sloth lemurs, it has helped determine the relationship between both groups and the closely related and extinct monkey lemurs.
It should also be kept in mind that morphological traits generally show low levels of dominance variance and that our results may not be applicable to other types of traits, such as life-history traits, that are known to be affected to a larger extent by dominance and epistatis [4].
Furthermore, morphological traits were more strongly correlated with geographic and climatic distances than life-history traits, reinforcing the conclusion that life-history traits showed a weaker response to directional selection than morphological traits.
Both traits showed nearly normal distribution.
Previous work examining morphological traits in willow showed similar results with regard to diploids and tetraploids, however no triploids were ever examined [ 28].
