Hello, I'm Luiza Anselmini!

Adaptive radiations serve as excellent models for studying speciation and the evolution of traits, with Cichlid fish being particularly noteworthy due to various adaptive radiations throughout the group's evolutionary history. Among these, recently discovered radiations in South America, specifically within the neotropical genus Crenicichla, have occurred in the basins of the Uruguay and Iguaçu Rivers. These radiations exhibit the same four well-defined ecomorphs repeatedly. One of these ecomorphs is characterized by hypertrophied lips, an adaptation for exploiting food resources in rocky crevices, facilitating sympatric speciation through ecological divergence in feeding performance.

This study compares the ancestral phenotype of thin lips (piscivorous) with the hypertrophied lip phenotype (insectivorous). It utilizes RNA-Seq data to provide a transcriptomic description of genes associated with lip morphology diversity in both adaptive radiations and to test whether there is parallelism or convergence in the molecular mechanisms of ecomorphological diversification associated with feeding in cichlids. The following comparisons of differentially expressed genes will be conducted: (1) between species within the same adaptive radiation exhibiting distinct phenotypes; (2) between species from different groups exhibiting the same phenotype; (3) between individuals with different phenotypes within a polymorphic population for this characteristic in Crenicichla iguassuensis.