Fig. 2. Fish color pattern diversity and mechanistic associations among pattern motifs.

(A) Pattern diversity in marine and freshwater fish families. The occurrence of the pattern motifs in each fish family is indicated by colored bars at the tip of the tree. Each pattern motif is widespread across fish lineages, showing the ubiquitous long-range similarity over local divergence. The 11 classes of pattern motifs are illustrated along with their abbreviations, color codes, and numbers of occurrence (inset). A total of 559 families, 4069 genera, and 18,114 species were examined. Fish phylogeny was based on Betancur-R et al. (61). (B) Heatmap showing the strength of the genus-level co-occurrence between each pairwise combination of the 11 pattern motifs. (C) Mechanistic associations among pattern motifs evaluated using z score. (D) Triple co-occurrence analysis showing the strength of the phylogenetic collocation of each pattern motif with a set of two spot motifs (Sp-D and Sp-L).