RUI: The Meaning of Morphology: Source Hierarchy for Phenotypic Variation of Skeletal Hard Parts (Bryozoa)

形态学的意义：骨骼硬部分表型变异的来源等级(苔藓虫纲)Steven J.HagemanEAR-0073648化石物种识别的标准主要基于古代有机体的可保存的硬部分。这与生物物种的分类形成对比，生物物种的分类除了骨骼硬部分外，可能还包括它们的软组织、行为、生化和遗传组成的数据。生物体的遗传特征与其形态特征之间关系的不确定性可能会引发关于化石物种生物学意义的问题。由于古生物学有能力记录远古时期的变化，它在回答进化生物学的基本问题方面做出了重大贡献。然而，在我们能够证明有机体骨骼坚硬部分变异的遗传成分与环境成分的相对重要性之前，这些问题不能有把握地解决。此外，关于环境变化的规模和幅度的差异如何影响骨骼硬部分的形态(即，一个环境中的微尺度空间差异可能比相距数公里的两个相似环境之间引起更多的形态变化，或者反之亦然)，人们知之甚少。通过测量在受控实验室中以克隆复制方式生长的现代海洋无脊椎动物(苔藓动物)骨骼的特征，骨骼硬部分的变化可以从数学上分离为它们的遗传和环境来源。这是一个自然系统，类似于克隆数百只羊，并在不同的环境中生长一组相同的克隆人，以确定环境对它们最终形态的影响。苏格兰盖蒂海洋实验室的研究人员已经在几个受控的环境条件下培育了潮间带苔藓虫不同群体的克隆复制。该项目将从这些标本中分离出遗传变异和环境变异。在这项研究的第二部分，将从野生环境中收集样本，这些环境已经被分层细分，以确定是否可以在真实世界的例子中区分信号。这项研究的结果将在进化生物学、生物地层学、生物地理学和化石谱系之间的关系等领域具有更广泛的适用性。

The Meaning of Morphology: Source Hierarchy of Phenotypic Variation of Skeletal Hard Parts (Bryozoa)Steven J. HagemanEAR-0073648Criteria for the recognition of fossil species are based largely on preservable hard parts of the ancient organism. This is in contrast to the classification of living species, which in addition to skeletal hard parts, may include data from their soft tissue, behavior, biochemical and genetic composition. Uncertainty about the relationships between genetic characteristics of an organism relative to its morphological characteristics can raise questions about the biological significance of fossil species. Because paleontology had the ability to document change through deep time, it has a significant contribution to make toward answering fundamental questions of evolutionary biology. These can not be addressed with confidence however, until we can document the relative importance of the genetic versus environmental components of variation in the skeletal hard parts of organisms. In addition, little is known about how differences in the scale and magnitude of environmental variation may affect skeletal hard part morphologies (i.e., microscale spatial variation within an environmental setting could induce more morphological change than between two similar settings many kilometers apart, or vice versa).By measuring features on the skeleton of modern colonial marine invertebrate organisms (Bryozoa) that are grown as clonal replicates in controlled laboratory experiments, the variation in the skeletal hard parts can be separated mathematically into their genetic and environmental sources. This is a natural system analogous to cloning hundreds of sheep and growing sets of identical clones in different environments to determine the environment's influence on their final morphology. Researchers at Gatty Marine Laboratory, Scotland have already grown clonal replicates of genetically different colonies of the intertidal bryozoan Electra pilosa under several controlled environmental conditions. This project will separate genetic from environmental variation in these specimens. In the second part of this study, specimens will be collected from the wild from environments that have been hierarchically subdivided in order to determine whether signals can be differentiated in a real world example. Results from this study will have broader applicability to the fields of evolutionary biology, biostratigraphy, biogeography, and relationships among fossil lineages.