Social fishes and single mothers: brain evolution in African cichlids.

Social fishes and single mothers: brain evolution in African

Ecological and Lineage-Specific Factors Drive the Molecular Evolution of Rhodopsin in Cichlid Fishes.

The visual system in the colorful cichlid fishes from the African great lakes is believed to be important for their adaptive radiations. However, few studies have attempted to compare the visual system of radiating cichlid lineages with that of cichlids that have not undergone recent radiations. One such study published in this journal (Schott RK, Refvik SP, Hauser FE, López-Fernández H, Chang ...

The evolution of complex brains and behaviors in African cichlid fishes

In this review, I explore the effects of both social organization and the physical environment, specifically habitat complexity, on the brains and behavior of highly visual African cichlid fishes, drawing on examples from primates and birds where appropriate. In closely related fishes from the monophyletic Ectodinii clade of Lake Tanganyika, both forces influence cichlid brains and behavior. Co...

Multilocus phylogeny of cichlid fishes (Pisces: Perciformes): evolutionary comparison of microsatellite and single-copy nuclear loci.

Among vertebrates, cichlid fishes are the paradigmatic example of adaptive radiation and ecological specialization. In turn, molecular genetic studies of cichlids have focused primarily on more recently diverged groups. Here, we present an evolutionary hypothesis of the major lineages of cichlid fishes based on DNA sequence data from two nuclear loci. One marker, Tmo-4C4, is a single-copy locus...

Is there convergence in the molecular pathways underlying the repeated evolution of sociality in African cichlids?

Despite wide variation in the complexity of social interactions across taxa, the basic behavioral components of sociality appear to be modulated by conserved hormone pathways. Specifically, the nonapeptide hormones oxytocin and vasopressin and their receptors have been implicated in regulating diverse social behaviors across vertebrates. Here, we took advantage of the repeated evolution of coop...