Scombroid fishes provide novel insights into the trait/rate associations of molecular evolution

The study of which life history traits primarily affect molecular evolutionary rates is often confounded by the covariance of these traits. Scombroid fishes (billfishes, tunas, barracudas, and their relatives) are unusual in that their mass-specific metabolic rate is positively associated with body size. This study exploits this atypical pattern of trait variation, which allows for direct tests of whether mass-specific metabolic rate or body size is the more important factor of molecular evolutionary rates. We inferred a phylogeny for scombroids from a supermatrix of molecular and morphological characters and used new phylogenetic comparative approaches to assess the associations of body size and mass-specific metabolic rate with substitution rate. As predicted by the body size hypothesis, there is a negative correlation between body size and substitution rate. However, unexpectedly, we also find a negative association between mass-specific metabolic and substitution rates. These relationships are supported by analyses of the total molecular data, separate mitochondrial and nuclear genes, and individual loci, and they are robust to phylogenetic uncertainty. The molecular evolutionary rates of scombroids are primarily tied to body size. This study demonstrates that groups with novel patterns of trait variation can be particularly informative for identifying which life history traits are the primary factors of molecular evolutionary rates.