ABR: Colony Integration in the Clonal Marine Benthos

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Buss 9315082 This Accomplishment-Based Award will allow Dr. Buss to continue work on colony integration in the clonal marine benthos. The primary objective in recent years has been an attempt to understand the causal basis of the correlation between growth morphology and life history in clonal organisms. Dr. Buss has (1) demonstrated that hydroid gastrovascular circulation is controlled by the spatial distribution of polyps, which act as pumps, and stolons, which conduct gastrovascular fluid between polyps, (2) developed techniques that permit automated collection of data on gastrovascular dynamics and (3) demonstrated that perturbation of gastrovascular circulation generates predictable alterations in growth morphology and life history. Dr. Buss will develop a computer model that will predict the growth morphology and life history characteristics of model colonies and will validate this model experimentally. Together with work on establishing that expression of pattern-forming genes is elicited by transduction of hydrodynamic signals, he will expect to unambiguously establish the causal basis of the relationship between growth morphology and life history. ****