Collaborative Research: Causes and Consequences of Exceptional Diversity in Spiny-Rayed Fishes

刺鱼是最成功的脊椎动物辐射之一，约有17,000个物种和惊人的形态和生态多样性，其中包括许多文化和经济上重要的物种，如金枪鱼、比目鱼、海马鱼、大口黑鱼和孔雀。这个多样化的群体代表了理解脊椎动物进化的最后几个伟大前沿之一。在这个项目中，将使用来自1500个物种标本的16个编码蛋白质的核基因的DNA序列数据，用几种系统发育推断的方法来研究这些鱼类的260多个科之间的进化关系。描述这些类群之间进化关系的系统发育树将与40多个化石校准点相结合，形成这些鱼类进化历史的时间校准分支图。这个经过时间校准的系统发育和来自1000多个物种的摄食和运动系统的功能重要解剖学特征的大型数据集将被用来比较生活在五种主要栖息地类型的谱系中的物种形成率和形态演进率：珊瑚礁、温带珊瑚礁、近岸软底、中上层海洋和淡水。从以前的工作中有一个强烈的理论预期，即淡水谱系将显示出高物种形成率，而珊瑚礁将显示出最高的物种形成率和形态进化，但这些期望从未得到经验上的解决。这项研究将加强我们对当今地球上最成功的脊椎动物辐射的进化关系和主要进化动力学的理解。来自1000多个物种的2万多个新的基因序列和形态数据集将向科学界提供。该项目将支持三名博士后学者的发展，并有一个主要的本科生培养计划。

Spiny-rayed fishes are one of the most successful radiations of vertebrate animals, with about 17,000 species and astonishing morphological and ecological diversity that includes many culturally and economically important species such as tunas, flounders, seahorses, largemouth bass, and guppies. This diverse group represents one of the last great frontiers to understand vertebrate evolution. In this project, the evolutionary relationships among more than 260 families of these fishes will be studied with several methods of phylogenetic inference using DNA sequence data from 16 protein-coding nuclear genes from specimens of 1,500 species. The phylogenetic trees depicting evolutionary relationships among these groups will be combined with more than 40 fossil calibration points to produce a time-calibrated branching diagram of the evolutionary history of these fishes. This time-calibrated phylogeny and a large data set of functionally important anatomical characteristics of the feeding and locomotor systems from over 1,000 species will then be used to compare the rates of speciation and rates of morphological evolution in lineages that live in the five major habitat types: coral reefs, temperate reefs, near-shore soft bottom, pelagic marine, and freshwater. There is a strong theoretical expectation from previous work that freshwater lineages will show high rates of speciation while coral reefs will show the highest rates of speciation and morphological evolution, but these expectations have never been addressed empirically. This research will strengthen our understanding of the evolutionary relationships and major evolutionary dynamics of the most successful radiation of vertebrate animals on the earth today. Over 20,000 new gene sequences and the morphological data set from over 1,000 species will be made available to the scientific community. The project will support the development of three postdoctoral scholars and has a major undergraduate training program.