Joe Styga, Ph. D., an Assistant Professor at the Mount in the Department of Biology, and Two MSJ Students, Isobel Brown and Maggie McMullen, Recently Had Their Research Published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Joe Styga, Ph. D., an Assistant Professor at the Mount in the Department of Biology, and two MSJ students, Isobel Brown and Maggie McMullen, recently had their research article “Possible ‘Silver-spoon’ Effect on Adult Terrestrial Jumping in the Mangrove Rivulus Fish” published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. Read below for an overview of the research they conducted, their research hypothesis, and their fascinating research findings!
“The work, which was conducted by myself and two undergraduate students (Isobel Brown and Maggie McMullen; both now in MSJ’s PT program) focused on understanding the effect that early life experiences have on behavior later in life, independent of an individual’s genes. We used the mangrove rivulus fish as a model in our work.
This fish is really cool because it is able to move on land through a behavior known as ‘tail flip’ jumping. Essentially, the fish curves its body into a “C” shape, and launches itself off the ground. It does this when the pools that it lives in dry up and it becomes stranded on land. It can actually jump up to 18x its body length!!!
Another reason why this fish is super cool is because it is the only (or one of very few, depending on who you ask) vertebrates that is a simultaneous hermaphrodite that is capable of self-fertilization. This is a fancy way of saying it can produce “clones” of itself through sexual reproduction. This aspect of its life history provides a great opportunity for biologists because it allows us to produce “natural”, pure genetic lines in a controlled lab space. We can then expose those different genetic lines to different environments. Ultimately the goal is to see which aspects of behavior are due to genetic factors and which are due to environmental differences.
In the case of the study that we published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, we changed the social environment. Basically, individuals were surrounded by different numbers of genetically identical siblings when they were developing in their eggs. Our hypothesis was that individuals from more crowded conditions in early development would be better jumpers later on in life because natural selection should favor dispersal away from closely related individuals to minimize competition (i.e., better jumpers). However, this was not what we found. Instead, we found that individuals from less crowded conditions were actually better jumpers than their counterparts, which may be because they are getting more resources from their parent, which translates to high performance later on (i.e., fewer eggs laid, means more resources per each egg).”