SPASOS v.1.0: a program for the inference of ancestral shape ontogenies

CATALANO S.A.; SEGURA V.; VERA CANDIOTTI F.

CLADISTICS (PRINT)

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2021 p. 630 - 638

0748-3007

We recently published a method toinfer ancestral landmark-based shape ontogenies that takes into account thepossible existence of changes in developmental timing. Here we describe SPASOS,a software to perform that analysis. SPASOS is an open source Windows programwritten in C. Input data include landmark coordinates for each specimen ?with the corresponding informationabout developmental timing? and aphylogenetic tree showing the relationships among the species sampled. Asoutput, the program produces image files for an easy visualization of theresults and data files useful for post-processing. The program incorporates aninterpolating function, based on weighting moving averages, which allowsanalysis of data with scarce information along the ontogenetic trajectory. Anempirical evaluation of this function showed its suitability to fill inincomplete ontogenetic trajectories. Finally, we present the results of areanalysis in SPASOS of a published dataset, where changes in developmentaltiming were originally inferred by considering PCA scores as shape variables.Both approaches retrieved the same four largest changes in developmentaltiming, but differed in the ancestral shapes inferred.