Camilo Lopez-Aguirre edited untitled.tex  over 8 years ago

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A broad variety of studies have focused in this genus, offering detailed information regarding their evolutionary history, behavior, functional morphology and ecology. Also, other studies have tried to shed light on its taxonomy, studying the morphological boundaries between species, as well as the effect of both biotic and environmental traits on its morphological plasticity. Despite the lack of concise agreement, the general consensus sets size variations as the main source of morphological differentiation between species. Hence, this feature has been widely used as a taxonomic clue to identify some of these species. However, published research using molecular approaches indicate that the morphological description and discrimination of these species is inaccurate, and misleads researchers from solving the identity of unknown cryptic species.     Given the fact that is becoming more evident that the use of Traditional Morphometrics (TM) for taxonomic purposes is not as accurate as though thought  before, the implementation of Geometric Morphometrics (GM) in this field is increasing. GM enables the decomposition of morphological variation in two independent components: size and shape. Although it has been accepted that size is the main source of variation in this genus, recent studies have re-evaluated this assumption, finding enough evidence to argue this hypothesis and propose that shape is also important for species delimitation in \textit{Carollia}. Within GM and the variety of tools and approaches available to study morphological variation, analyzing the presence and patterns of asymmetry on a feature is been used to study hidden sources of variation (e.g. developmental instability, genetics and phenotypic variation). There are three main types of asymmetry; Fluctuating Asymmetry (FA), Directional Asymmetry (DA) and Antisymmetry (AS). Each type has specific mathematical basis and ecological interpretation: FA reflects genetic and developmental factors and it is usually used as an indicator of stress or environmental instability; DA serves to describe specific patterns of morphological variation within a sample, and it is usually associated with the inherent biology of each taxon.   The utility of decomposing the morphological variation in its symmetric and asymmetric components in order to elucidate differences between species has not been sufficiently explored. Previous studies show the adequacy of this approach to detect specific patterns of morphological variation that could even be useful to taxonomically discriminate species within a genus. This methodology has only been used to study the morphology of taxa with fractal and radial symmetry.  In order to further explore the importance of shape variation for the morphological delimitation and identification of \textit{Carollia} species, in this study, it was aimed to isolate and study the patterns of symmetric and asymmetric morphological shape  variation of the genus \textit{Carollia} in Colombia.   \section{Materials and methods}