This is the data associated with the publication titled: "Colour pattern divergence in reef fish species is rapid and driven by both range overlap and range symmetry"
This dataset contains values quantifying the dissimilarity between species-pairs colour patterns. We utilised an objective digital imaging technique available in R (package: "patternize") to quantify the difference in both colour and pattern between species-pairs. Since we were interested in colour pattern divergence, we wanted to measure the relative difference between colour patterns in recently-evolved species pairs. Species pairs were identified from a published phylogeny (Cowman and Bellwood, 2011) as being reciprocally monophyletic based on the given phylogeny. We identified 22 distinct species pairs (equating 42 species). Five images of each of the 42 species were collected from various image databases yielding a total of 210 images. The fish's colour pattern was then objectively analysed from every image and, subsequently, all images were compared using a multivariate dissimilarity approach (specifically, Gower's distance). This yielded a dissimilarity matrix of pairwise comparisons for every single image compared to every other image. These values take on a range of 0 to 1, 0 being completely similar, 1 being completely different. In this dataset, the 25 pairwise comparisons for each pair (5 images of a pair member x 5 images of its counterpart = 25 pairwise comparisons) are displayed for each species pair. This variable’s column is titled "dissim".
Additionally, the estimated time of divergence (in Ma) for each pair is listed. This variable’s column name is "tod". Each pair’s geographic range overlap and geographic range symmetry values are also listed. These two variables were calculated according to Barraclough and Vogler (2000) and their column names are "overlap" and "sym" respectively.
Lastly, there is the column named "pairID". This is a three digit number that corresponds to the node number of each species pair from the original phylogeny (Cowman and Bellwood, 2011). The .tre file of the amended phylogeny has been included. This phylogeny was used to account for phylogenetic relatedness when performing regression analyses in the associated manuscript.