This research will focus on the evolution and diversity of labroid fishes - including cichlids, labrids (wrasses and parrotfish), pomacentrids (damselfishes) and embiotocids (surfperch). At over 3,000 species, these are among the most successful and diverse groups of bony fishes. Hypotheses will be tested about the effect of major innovations found in the pharyngeal jaws of these fishes on speciation rate, morphological diversity, and ecological diversity. The research has two major components. DNA sequence from 9 genes and 650 species will be obtained to determine the phylogenetic relationships between labroids and other fishes. The resulting phylogenetic trees will be used as the basis for making comparisons of diversity between groups that possess the modified pharyngeal jaw, and close relatives that lack the specialization.
The major contribution of this research will be to improve our understanding of how breakthroughs in functional design impact the evolutionary success of lineages. New insights will be gained into evolutionary relationships within one of the least understood branches of the bony-fish tree of life. Training and mentoring will be provided for two post-doctoral researchers and one graduate student. Teaching modules will be developed from this research for undergraduate and graduate courses. An undergraduate internship program will be developed to recruit students from disadvantaged backgrounds into research opportunities provided by this project.
This research was focused on the evolution and diversity of labroid fishes, which includes cichlids, labrids (wrasses and parrotfish), pomacentrids (damselfishes) and embiotocids (surfperch). At over 3,000 species, these are among the most successful and diverse groups of ray-finned fishes. Hypotheses were tested on the effect of major innovations found in the pharyngeal jaws of these fishes on speciation rate, morphological disparity, and ecological diversity. The research produced DNA sequences from 10 genes for more than 700 that was used to infer the evolutionary relationships of labroids and other ray-finned fishes. The resulting phylogenetic trees showed that labroid fishes are not a natural group, in other words the individual groups of labroid fishes are more closely related to other lineages of ray-finned fishes than to other labroid groups. This indicates that the modified pharyngeal jaw in labroid fishes has several independent origins in the evolutionary history of ray-finned fishes. The major contribution of this research has been an improvement of our understanding of how breakthroughs in functional design impact the evolutionary success of lineages. Several novel insights into the evolutionary relationships of one of the least understood branches of the vertebrate tree of life were obtained. This work resulted in the training and mentoring of five undergraduate students, three graduate students, and two post-doctoral researchers. Teaching modules were developed from this research for an undergraduate course on the biology and diversity of fishes and graduate a course on advanced evolutionary analysis.
