Connecting from genes to behavior during the diversification of sea fireflies

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• Dr Nicholai Hensley, Department of Zoology
• Tuesday 29 October 2024, 13:00-14:00
• Part II Lecture Theatre, Department of Zoology.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Henry North.

Every night, Caribbean reefs are home to a massive variety of ostracod species (Luxorina, Crustacea) which perform bioluminescent displays to attract mates, analogous to terrestrial fireflies. Males swim up from the benthos to secrete discrete sachets of cerulean slime into species-specific patterns that females use to track and follow them. In this talk, I summarise my and others’ work highlighting our efforts to catalogue this little-known but amazing diversity in order to understand the drivers and constraints to speciation. Over the past decade, we have undertaken extensive field sampling across 5 countries, discovering _{50 new species. When comparing localities even within the same region with previously described species, biogeographic patterns show high endemism, potentially due to low dispersal. To further understand the origins of this diversity, I focused on candidate molecular mechanisms underpinning disparity in their mating displays, which should be important during mate choice. From combining phylogenetics, transcriptomics, and in vitro protein assays, current results suggest that rampant gene duplication and subsequent divergence has generated functional variation in the proteins responsible for creating light during bioluminescence. Changes in the function of these homologs during repeated bouts of speciation may prime this system for rapid phenotypic evolution, but muddies the water if predicting the locus of evolution a priori. Despite this genetic redundancy, physiological data hint at constraints which may limit the mating display variation across species. Because the behaviour of these animals was only scientifically recorded ca. 1980, coupled with their small size (}2 mm) and restricted activity to periods of darkest night, Luxorine ostracods have a potentially widening Linnean shortfall with their degrading habitat. To bridge this, future work will focus on species description while connecting functional to phenotypic diversity, and assessing how behaviour contributes to reproductive isolation in this charismatic clade.

This talk is part of the Zoology Departmental Seminar Series series.

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• Part II Lecture Theatre, Department of Zoology
• Zoology Departmental Seminar Series

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