DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Phylogeny and the Evolution of Colony Organization in the Siphonophora, Cnidaria

NSF提案deb -0408014博士的非技术摘要。耶鲁大学的冈特·瓦格纳（Gunter Wagner）和凯西·邓恩（Casey Dunn）将研究虹吸管水母（siphonophores）的系统学和多样性。虹吸管水母是一种群居水母。管水母生活在开阔的海洋中，是世界上最长的动物，有时长度超过50米。它们也是所有群体生物中最复杂的。它们不像人类那样只由组织成组织和器官的专门细胞组成，而是拥有完整的动物，每只动物都有专门的任务，比如喂养或繁殖，这些动物被精确地组织成一个群体的“超级有机体”。管水母的组织在同一物种的不同种群之间是相同的，但在不同的物种之间是不同的。这项资助将使我们第一次有可能在不同的虹吸细胞中描述这种群体水平的组织，并研究虹吸细胞之间的关系。这些信息将被用来检验虹吸管中菌落形式进化的假设。研究结果将直接关系到几个长期以来引起普遍生物学兴趣的重要问题：什么时候进化有利于组成生物体的单位的特化？复杂性是如何在不同层次的生物组织中产生的？什么时候精确的身体组织被进化所青睐？尽管人们早就认识到管水母特别适合研究这些基本问题，但由于它们极其脆弱，而且历史上用来收集海洋生物的渔网严重损害了它们，因此很难对它们进行深入了解。然而，最近海洋学技术的进步极大地改善了这种情况。与生物海洋学家的持续合作将使从远洋研究船上进行水肺潜水和使用安装在潜艇上的精密采样器收集虹吸管成为可能。使用这些新方法获得的标本通常处于原始状态，非常适合这项资助将支持的工作。这项拨款具有重要的更广泛的意义。它将培训一名年轻的科学家，学习虹吸管系统学和研究海洋生物的方法。虹吸管在开放海洋的生态中起着核心作用，这项工作的结果将为虹吸管生物学的其他方面的研究提供坚实的基础，包括它们与环境的相互作用。

Non-technical abstract for NSF Proposal DEB-0408014Dr. Gunter Wagner and Mr. Casey Dunn of Yale University will study the systematics and diversity of siphonophores, a type of colonial jellyfish. Siphonophores live in the open ocean and are the longest animals in the world, sometimes exceeding 50 meters in length. They are also among the most complex of all colonial organisms. Rather than consisting only of specialized cells organized into tissues and organs, as humans do, they have entire animals, each specialized for a task such as feeding or reproduction, that are precisely organized into a colonial "super organism". The organization of siphonophores is the same from colony to colony of the same species but different between species. This grant will make it possible to describe this colony-level organization in a diversity of siphonophores for the first time, and to study the relationship of siphonophores to each other. This information will then be used to test hypotheses about the evolution of colony form in siphonophores. The results will bear directly on several important questions that have long been of general biological interest: when does evolution favor specialization in the units that make up an organism? How does complexity arise at different levels of biological organization? When is precise body organization favored by evolution? Even though it has long been recognized that siphonophores are particularly well suited to the investigation of these fundamental questions, it has been difficult to learn much about them because they are extremely fragile and the nets that have been historically used to collect oceanic organisms severely damage them. Recent advances in oceanographic technology have dramatically improved the situation, though. Ongoing collaborations with biological oceanographers will make it possible to collect siphonophores for this work by SCUBA diving from ocean-going research vessels and through the use of sophisticated samplers mounted on submarines. The specimens obtained using these new methods are often in pristine condition and are ideally suited to the work this grant will support.This grant has important broader implications. It will train a young scientist in siphonophore systematics and the methods used to study oceanic organisms. Siphonophores play a central role in the ecology of the open ocean and the results of this work will provide a strong foundation for the investigation of other aspects of siphonophore biology, including their interaction with their environment.