Differentiation at a microgeographical scale within two species of ground beetle,Carabus auronitensandC. nemoralis(Coleoptera, Carabidae): a geometrical morphometric approach

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Abstract
New morphometric methods, the geometrical morphometrics, offer promising perspectives to appraise morphological variation among organisms and open up, to a large extent, the field of morphometrics for the study of systematics and evolution. Until now, however, few studies have explored the potential of these methods at a microgeographical scale. In the present work, we applied them to quantify morphological (size and shape) differentiation among populations of two forest species of ground beetles:Carabus auronitensandC. nemoralis. We found a significant shape variation among sites, as well as among sexes, for both species. Additionally, forC. auronitens, we found significant positive correlations in both sexes between morphological (shape) and geographical distances between populations. In contrast, significant size differences were found between sexes, but not between sites. We conclude that geometrical morphometric methods provide valuable tools for the study of morphological variation among populations and therefore offer, on the whole, interesting perspectives for the study of biodiversity patterns.