Abstract <p>Adaptive diversification, the rapid splitting of an ancestral population into coexisting ecological specialists due to trade-offs associated with dietary and reproductive competition, is a fascinating challenge for evolutionary biology. In northern freshwaters, the most numerous and complex cases of adaptive diversification of a Holocene time are exhibited by salmonids. Recently, a new hotspot of salmonid diversification has been identified in Kamchatka, providing cases of riverine, lacustrine and lake-river diversification through budding, divergence and radiation in the lineage of <i>Salvelinus malma</i> charr. This review provides a brief description of more than ten cases of <i>S. malma</i> diversification found and described since 2010. The main environmental gradients, i.e. the sharing of lotic-lentic, pelagic-benthic, shallow-deepwater and windward-leeward littoral resources, are replicated in independent <i>S. malma</i> diversifications across Kamchatka. The data obtained confirm that charrs have evolved the same sympatric adaptive phenotypes when exploiting similar ecological opportunities of freshwater basins newly formed after the end of the Ice Age. It is proposed that the multiple parallelisms in morphology and ecology of the emerging morphs are due to a similar canalization of ontogeny under the pressure of the same environmental factors. Natural selection drives the variants of variability realized by heterochronic developmental shifts and allometric growth under environmental control. The possibility of implementing multiple developmental trajectories provides the opportunity for rapid parallel local adaptations.</p>