Systematics and Evolutionary Biology of the Reef-Building Coral Genus Porites (Scleractinia)

滨珊瑚属是世界上种类最多、分布最广的属之一 活珊瑚 从生态学和地质学上讲， 自始新世（55百万年）以来的大多数热带珊瑚礁。 Porites一直是 许多珊瑚礁的主要结构建造者;它有助于创造 栖息地被无数其他生物占据;和它的骨骼 是世界上一些最具生产力的国家的主要组成部分 第三系油层。 Porites还包含保存在其 一些最详细的古气候记录的骨架 来自热带浅海。 在这项研究中，滨珊瑚是作为一个模式系统，调查 热带海洋长寿生物的进化 主要地球物理过程的背景（板块构造和 冰川海平面波动），这些变化塑造了世界海洋 在新生代。 酶电泳和三种 形态学数据将用于描述至少80%的印度- 太平洋和加勒比海物种。 这些数据将用于：1。 估计物种的年龄和从共同分歧的日期 祖先; 2.构建和比较基于遗传 物种之间的形态相似性; 3.测试 关于时代和地质条件的不同假设 有利于珊瑚物种形成; 4.研究生命之间的关系 历史特征、进化速率和概率 物种形成 这项研究有望解决许多慢性 通过将遗传和 形态学分类，描述以前未知的 物种，并确定可靠的诊断特征， 被生物学家和地质学家使用， 材料

Porites is one of the most diverse and widely- distributed genera of living corals. It has dominated, ecologically and geologically, most tropical reefs since the Eocene (55 Mya). Porites has been the primary frame-builder of many reefs; it helps create the habitats occupied by innumerable other organisms; and its skeletons are a major constituent of some of the world's most productive Tertiary oil formations. Porites also contains preserved in its skeleton some of the most detailed paleoclimatic records available from shallow tropical seas. In this study, Porites is used as a model system for investigating the evolution of long-lived tropical marine organisms within the context of the major geophysical processes (plate tectonics and glacial sea-level fluctuations) that have shaped the world's oceans during the Cenozoic. Enzyme electrophoresis and three kinds of morphological data will be used to describe at least 80% of Indo- Pacific and Caribbean species. The data will be used to: 1. estimate ages of species and dates of divergence from common ancestors; 2. construct and compare phylogenies based on genetic and morphological similarities among the species; 3. test alternative hypotheses about the times and geological conditions favoring coral speciation; 4. examine relationships between life history characteristics, evolutionary rates and probabilities of speciation. The study is expected to resolve many chronic taxonomic problems within the genus by correlating genetic and morphological classifications, to describe previously unknown species, and to identify reliable diagnostic characters that can be used by biologists and geologists working with living and fossil material.