"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
The principal investigator studies vertebrate brains and how they have evolved to subserve different behaviors and adaptations. In this project he will study the brain of the African lungfish, with various techniques that will reveal its structure and organization. We know that the animals that first emerged from the sea to live on land were lobe-finned fishes, but we know little else about these ancestors of all land vertebrates. Information on living lobe-finned fishes, however, will allow us to infer a great deal of information regarding the biology of this ancestor, particularly when that information is compared with data on amphibians, which descended from these early land-dwellers. Brain organization, particularly the organization of the forebrain, has been used to provide valuable clues to an animal's biology and it's taxonomic relationships with other animals. Little is known about brain organization in the living lobe-finned fishes, as they are few in number and have not been convenient to study. In addition to the infamous and elusive coelacanth, the living lobe-finned fishes are only six species of lungfishes, native to Africa, South America, and Australia. This project will generate such information and has the potential to provide valuable insight into the field of comparative neuroanatomy. The newly found information will be compared with existing information on amphibian brains to test the hypothesis that the brains of living lobe-finned fishes are far more like those of amphibians than has previously been believed. The similarities in brain organization between living lobe-finned fishes and amphibians likely existed also in their common ancestor, and thus will allow scientists to infer much needed information about the first land animals to emerge from the sea to live on land. This project will provide resources to continue dissemination of this work among scholars and the lay public across the world.
