This project will involve investigators from eight institutions working to resolve evolutionary relationships within the euteleost fishes, which represent over one third of vertebrate diversity. An important component will be education of the public on the importance, evolutionary history, and diversity of these animals. Phylogenetic analyses will employ DNA sequence data from 20 genes in 1,500 species representing all euteleost families, and approximately 450 morphological characters from 300 euteleost lineages. Resulting phylogenetic hypotheses will be used to facilitate understanding of the evolution of fish diversity and re-assess and revise the systematics of euteleosts. Research on the euteleost tree of life will be integrated into science education by using euteleost phylogeny as a framework for exploring the evolution of morphological, genetic, developmental, and behavioral diversity of fishes. This will be developed as an instructional guide, a "Fish ToL Activity Book," directed at upper elementary and middle school children and disseminated in non-formal and school settings working in partnership with the National Science Teachers Association Press and the National 4-H Afterschool Council. Undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs will participate directly in the research project.
The euteleosts include some 346 families, 2,935 genera and 17,419 species. Over two thirds of all fishes and nearly a third of all vertebrates are euteleosts, which include most of the economically important fishes such as salmons, basses, cods and tunas. This study will facilitate informed predictions about the poorly known characteristics of most euteleosts and will considerably improve the evolutionary context for understanding model organisms such as zebrafish, pufferfish, cichlids, medaka, and stickleback, which are central to the burgeoning fields of functional genomics, genetics and evolutionary developmental biology.
The researchers involved in the Euteleost Tree of Life grant re-wrote the tree of life for all ray-finned fishes. By combining or comparing new genetic data with more than two hundred years of anatomical data, researchers are now able to explore the evolution of more than half of all vertebrates (all 'fishes' except the distantly related hagfishes, lampreys, sharks, chimaeras, rays, lungfishes, and coelacanths). This new tree of life and its corresponding changes to fish classification allow scientists from across the globe to place all of the disparate and structured biological knowledge of fishes into a single, maximally efficient, and cohesive evolutionary context. This context opens up countless new biochemical, biomechanical, and developmental avenues that can be investigated and analyzed with shared ancestry taken into account. This will not only help re-write ichthyological textbooks, but it will shape our understanding of the timing and diversification of fishes and their biology and conservation. This work has already shown that much of the speciation leading to extant groups of ray-finned fishes occurred between the late Mesozoic and early Cenozoic, identifying this period as a new "Second Age of Fishes." In addition to this study of the timing of fish evolution, this research identified four groups of marine spiny-rayed fishes (coral-reef blennies and gobies, deep-sea snailfishes, and open-ocean tunas) that have demonstrably higher rates of speciation that are comparable to the often-studied textbook-example of adaptive radiation, the Afro-American cichlids. Finally, these studies can be used to explore recurring specialization in fishes such as our discovery that biofluorescence was widespread in fishes. Taking advantage of the research conducted during this proposal, we were able to not only enumerate that hundreds of species have evolved this fascinating specialization, but we were able to show that it had evolved independently more than thirty times. Exploring evolutionary scenarios across all fishes were simply not possible prior to this funded research project that generated the first explicit and fossil-calibrated evolutionary hypothesis of all ray-finned fishes. The Field Museum component of this research project supported the training of two high school students, two undergraduate students (both later graduating and entering doctoral programs in ecology and evolutionary biology), one high-school biology teacher, six graduate students, and two postdoctoral fellows. Beyond this hands-on training of thirteen young scientists and teachers, this research was broadly disseminated to the general public. The revised tree of life for fishes was utilized in the Creatures of Light exhibit and associated lectures at The Field Museum that was viewed by more than 500,000 visitors. This work played an important role in Field Museum donor and member events as well as the 26 episodes of the "What the Fish?" podcast series that was downloaded more than 80,000 times. The resulting work from The Field Museum was published in more than twenty publications that were picked up by the popular press including articles in venues ranging from CNN to LiveScience to The Los Angeles Times to National Geographic News to Wired to The New York Times.
