Biodiversity is all around us, and its origins have been the focus of intense study for centuries. In spite of these efforts, however, we remain largely ignorant of the forces that promote and maintain species diversity over time. Under this award we seek to understand how the genome and environment interact to promote biodiversity. To this end we will take advantage of a system that combines experimental tractability and evolutionary richness. Cichlids are a family of fresh water fish from the East African Rift-Valley that are indisputably the most evolutionarily successful group of vertebrates on the planet. In a few million years, over a thousand species have evolved from a common ancestor. To put it another way, in the same amount of time that the human species is old, a thousand cichlid species have evolved. Here we will take a genetic approach to try to understand how this came to be. Specifically, we will scan the genomes of fish with differently shaped heads to search for genes that have contributed to species differences. An emphasis on the head has a direct ecological consequence, as different head shapes will determine where a fish lives and what it feeds on. We will also repeat this experiment under different environmental conditions to gain a better appreciation for how different genes in the genome are expressed under different environmental conditions to promote species diversity and evolutionary success. This highly interdisciplinary project provides a rich intellectual landscape to train students in various methods and theories. It also offers an explicit framework to bring high school science teachers up to date with the latest trends, concepts and theories in evolutionary biology. In essence it has the potential to modernize the high school curriculum with respect to evolution education. This last point is of particular importance, as a recent survey showed that only 14% of Americans considered evolution to be "definitely true". Clearly we are failing our students, and since high school is the last time when many Americans will take a science course, it is of paramount importance to improve our methods and strategies for teaching evolution to this age group.
