Chris Martin has bred more than 3,000 hybrid fish in his time as a graduate student in evolution and ecology at UC Davis, a pursuit that has helped him create one of the most comprehensive snapshots of natural selection in the wild and demonstrated a key prediction in evolutionary biology.
"We can see a surprisingly complex snapshot of natural selection driving the evolution of new specialized species," said Martin, who with Professor Peter Wainwright published a paper on the topic in the Jan. 11, 2013, issue of the journal Science.
The "adaptive landscape" is very important for evolutionary biology, but rarely measured, Martin said. He's been fascinated with the concept since high school.
An adaptive landscape takes variable traits in an animal or plant, such as jaw size and shape, spreads them over a surface, and reveals peaks of success (what evolutionary scientists call fitness) where those traits become most effective, or adaptive.
It is a common and powerful idea that influences thinking about evolution. But while the concept is straightforward, it is much harder to map out such a landscape in the wild.
For example, about 50 species of pupfish are found across the Americas. The tiny fish, about an inch or so long, mostly eat algae on rocks and other detritus. Martin has been studying species found only in a few lakes on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, where some of the fish have evolved different-shaped jaws that allow them to feed on hard-shelled prey like snails or, in one case, to snatch scales off other fish.
In a paper published in 2011, Martin showed that these San Salvadoran fish are evolving at an explosively faster rate than other pupfish.
Martin brought some of the fish back to the lab at UC Davis and bred hybrids with fish with different types of jaws. He created about 3,000 hybrids in all, which were measured, photographed and tagged. Martin then took about 2,000
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| Contact: Andy Fell ahfell@ucdavis.edu 530-752-4533 University of California - Davis Source:Eurekalert |
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