Phenotypic flexibility in background-mediated color change in sticklebacks.

"Conflict of interest: We have no competing interests."

"FUNDING This work was supported by funds kindly provided by the Kalmar and Växjö’s major Linnaeus Scholarship for research within ecological sustainable development (grant to P.T.) and the Linnaeus University (to P.T., A.S., and A.F.). We are grateful to H. Hallberg, J. Nilsson, O. Nordahl, J. Sunde, and P. Söderling for assistance in the field and the laboratory and to Prof. P. Larsson for providing laboratory resources. We thank J. DeFaveri for invaluable input regarding the research design. We are grateful to S. Merilaita, O. Nordahl, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments that improved the manuscript. P.T., A.F., and J.M. conceived the study. P.T., M.H., A.S., and A.F. designed the experiments. M.H. performed experiments, and M.H. and P.T. analyzed the data. All authors contributed to interpretation of results. P.T. drafted the first manuscript. All authors commented and agreed to the final version of the manuscript. Conflict of interest: We have no competing interests. Data accessibility: Analyses reported in this article can be reproduced using the data provided by Tibblin et al. (2020)."