Publications by authors named "Gaston Aguilera"

Specimens of Imparfinis were recently collected in north-western Argentina from the Bermejo River basin (Salta and Jujuy Provinces), del Valle River (Salta Province) and Horcones River (Santiago del Estero Province). An integrative approach to taxonomy, combining a detailed morphological study and molecular phylogenetic analyses, was applied to determine the species identity of these specimens. A principal components analysis of morphological data clustered the specimens from north-western Argentina and from the Amazon basin, indicating a close morphological resemblance.

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Phylogenetic comparative studies suggest that the direction of deviation from bilateral symmetry (sidedness) might evolve through genetic assimilation; however, the changes in sidedness inheritance remain largely unknown. We investigated the evolution of genital asymmetry in fish of the family Anablepidae, in which males' intromittent organ (the gonopodium, a modified anal fin) bends asymmetrically to the left or the right. In most species, males show a 1 : 1 ratio of left-to-right-sided gonopodia.

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Animal genitalia vary considerably across taxa, with divergence in many morphological traits, including striking departures from symmetry. Different mechanisms have been proposed to explain this diversity, mostly assuming that at least some of the phenotypic variation is heritable. However, heritability of the direction of genital asymmetry has been rarely determined.

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Asymmetries in bilateral organisms attract a lot of curiosity given that they are conspicuous departures from the norm. They allow the investigation of the integration at different levels of biological organization. Here we study whether and how behavioral and asymmetrical anatomical traits co-evolved and work together.

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Freshwater sulfide springs have extreme environmental conditions that only few vertebrate species can tolerate. These species often develop a series of morphological and molecular adaptations to cope with the challenges of life under the toxic and hypoxic conditions of sulfide springs. In this paper, we described a new fish species of the genus Jenynsia, Anablepidae, from a sulfide spring in Northwestern Argentina, the first in the family known from such extreme environment.

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Gymnogeophagus jaryi, new species, is described from Southern tributaries of the Middle Paraná basin in Misiones. It can be distinguished from all other members of the genus, except from G. australis and G.

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A new species assigned to the genus Trichomycterus from the area of the waterfalls of Tabay stream, Paraná River basin, Misiones, Argentina, is described. Trichomycterus ytororo sp. nov.

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Altitudinal gradients represent an appropriate system to assess whether there is a relationship between richness patterns, environmental variables, and the ecological processes that determine the species type and number inhabiting a given area. In mountain streams freshwater fishes, the most prevalent relationship is a monotonic decrease in species richness with elevation. The objective of this study was to evaluate four hypotheses that can explain the negative relationship between local fish species richness and altitude, 1) the hypothesis of decreasing energy availability, 2) the hypothesis of increasing climate severity, 3) the hypothesis of habitat diversity, and 4) the hypothesis of isolation by physical severity of the environment.

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