Collaborative Research: Evolutionary lability and adaptive plasticity in physiological and molecular mechanisms of behavior

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Genes shape how sensitive individuals are to environmental conditions during development, and this environmental sensitivity influences the behaviors produced in adulthood. This project seeks to understand how genes and developmental conditions together influence the brain, and how that alters social behaviors. The planned research takes advantage of extensive information on genetic and environmental influences on behavior of guppies, small fish that have evolved numerous behavioral responses to predators. Guppies that experience high and low levels of predation in the wild will be raised in laboratory conditions with and without predator exposure during development. Genetic and molecular experiments will link the patterns of gene expression in different brain regions to neural activity patterns and the resulting social behaviors. Results will demonstrate the extent to which similar behavioral traits (increased sociality in fish from high-predation sites and in fish exposed to predators) rely on the same gene expression changes and brain activity patterns, or whether similar behaviors may emerge from a variety of neural mechanisms. These findings will also reveal how sensitivity to environmental conditions shapes evolution of behavior. Developing this novel experimental approach will provide a model for other researchers seeking to understand the impacts of gene expression differences on behavior. The PIs will incorporate this research into undergraduate courses and will train graduate students via annual workshops on analysis of gene expression data. The simplicity and availability of guppies also make them amenable to enriching K-12 curricula in evolution and behavior, through development of a guppy module for for the Understanding Evolution resources for teaching evolution (http://evolution.berkeley.edu/). This project will allow the Colorado State University researchers to extend an ongoing program in which lab personnel work with middle school classes to design and implement behavioral experiments using guppies to reach a larger group of students.