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

带刺鱼类是脊椎动物中最成功的物种之一，大约有17000种，形态和生态多样性惊人，包括许多文化和经济上重要的物种，如金枪鱼、比目鱼、海马、大口黑鲈和孔雀鱼。这个多样化的群体代表了理解脊椎动物进化的最后一个伟大前沿。在本项目中，将利用来自1500种鱼类标本的16个蛋白质编码核基因的DNA序列数据，通过几种系统发育推断方法研究这些鱼类260多个科之间的进化关系。描绘这些群体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，以产生这些鱼类进化历史的时间校准分支图。这种经过时间校准的系统发育和来自1000多个物种的进食和运动系统的功能重要解剖特征的大型数据集将用于比较生活在五种主要栖息地类型中的物种形成率和形态进化率：珊瑚礁，温带珊瑚礁，近岸软底，远洋海洋和淡水。从以前的工作中有一个强烈的理论期望，淡水谱系将显示出高的物种形成率，而珊瑚礁将显示出最高的物种形成率和形态进化率，但这些期望从未得到实证解决。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。2万多个新的基因序列和1000多个物种的形态数据集将提供给科学界。该项目将支持3名博士后的发展，并有一个主要的本科培养计划。

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.