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

NSF提案DEB-0408014 Dr的非技术摘要。耶鲁大学的冈特瓦格纳和凯西邓恩先生将研究管水母的系统学和多样性，管水母是一种群体水母。 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和器官的特化细胞组成，而是拥有完整的动物，每一个动物都专门从事一项任务，如喂养或繁殖，这些动物被精确地组织成一个殖民地的“超级有机体”。 管水母的组织结构在同一物种的群体之间是相同的，但在物种之间是不同的。 这笔赠款将使人们有可能描述这种群体级组织的多样性管水母的第一次，并研究管水母相互之间的关系。 然后，这些信息将被用来测试关于管水母中菌落形式进化的假设。 这些结果将直接关系到几个重要的问题，这些问题长期以来一直是普遍生物学感兴趣的问题：进化何时有利于组成有机体的单位的专业化？ 复杂性是如何在生物组织的不同层次上产生的？ 精确的身体组织何时受到进化的青睐？ 尽管人们早就认识到管水母特别适合研究这些基本问题，但很难对它们有太多了解，因为它们非常脆弱，历史上用来收集海洋生物的网严重损害了它们。 然而，海洋学技术的最新进展极大地改善了这种情况。 目前与生物海洋学家的合作将使我们能够通过从远洋研究船上进行水肺潜水和使用安装在潜艇上的先进取样器来收集管水母。 使用这些新方法获得的标本通常处于原始状态，非常适合本基金支持的工作。本基金具有重要的广泛意义。 它将培训一名青年科学家学习管水母系统学和研究海洋生物的方法。 管水母在公海生态学中起着核心作用，这项工作的结果将为研究管水母生物学的其他方面，包括它们与环境的相互作用提供坚实的基础。

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.