Data from: 2D or Not 2D? Testing the utility of 2D vs. 3D landmark data in geometric morphometrics of the sculpin subfamily Oligocottinae (Pisces; Cottoidea)

We contrast 2D vs. 3D landmark‐based geometric morphometrics in the fish subfamily Oligocottinae by using 3D landmarks from CT‐generated models and comparing the morphospace of the 3D landmarks to one based on 2D landmarks from images. The 2D and 3D shape variables capture common patterns across taxa, such that the pairwise Procrustes distances among taxa correspond and the trends captured by principal component analysis are similar in the xy plane. We use the two sets of landmarks to test several ecomorphological hypotheses from the literature. Both 2D and 3D data reject the hypothesis that head shape correlates significantly with the depth at which a species is commonly found. However, in taxa where shape variation in the z‐axis is high, the 2D shape variables show sufficiently strong distortion to influence the outcome of the hypothesis tests regarding the relationship between mouth size and feeding ecology. Only the 3D data support previous studies which showed that large mouth sizes correlate positively with high percentages of elusive prey in the diet. When used to test for morphological divergence, 3D data show no evidence of divergence, while 2D data show that one clade of oligocottines has diverged from all others. This clade shows the greatest degree of z‐axis body depth within Oligocottinae, and we conclude that the inability of the 2D approach to capture this lateral body depth causes the incongruence between 2D and 3D analyses.