For many male African cichlid fish, the best way to attract a mate is to build a really nice pit or sand castle on a lake bottom.
And thus the best way to study evolution's effect on behavior might be to study why the fish build these structures, known collectively as bowers. New research by Stanford biologists reveals that multiple physical traits that arose in parallel heavily influence the fish's mating behavior of choice.
The research provides a potential framework for understanding how diverse molecular and physiological evolutionary adaptations can influence a species' behavior, and is detailed in the current issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
The evolution of behavior is notoriously difficult to study for a number of reasons, but the incredibly rapid speciation of cichlid fish in Lake Malawi in Africa makes them a prime candidate for investigation. More than 500 species of this family evolved in just the past 5 million years, one of the fastest rates among all vertebrates. And although these fish display a wide array of physical variation and traits, their genetic background is nearly identical, with just 0.26 percent variation across the species.
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