| Grant number: | 14/05051-5 |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral |
| Start date: | November 01, 2014 |
| End date: | August 31, 2018 |
| Field of knowledge: | Biological Sciences - Genetics - Animal Genetics |
| Agreement: | Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) |
| Principal Investigator: | Claudio de Oliveira |
| Grantee: | Fábio Fernandes Roxo |
| Host Institution: | Instituto de Biociências (IBB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Botucatu. Botucatu , SP, Brazil |
| Associated scholarship(s): | 15/00691-9 - Harnessing Phylogenomic Comparative Methods to Understand the Diversification of Fishes of the Superfamily Loricarioidea, BE.EP.PD |
Abstract The Loricarioidea is the largest monophyletic group of catfishes endemic to the Neotropics with about 1,412 valid species assigned to six family-level taxa; Astroblepidae (61 species), Callichthyidae (200 species), Loricariidae (870 species), Nematogenyidae (1 species), Scoloplacidae (6 species) and Trichomycteridae (273 species). Loricarioid fishes are widely distributed throughout freshwater habitats in tropical South America and southern Central America. In addition to their exceptional species richness, loricarioids exhibit an wide range of morphological, physiological and ecological specializations, occupying many habitats and trophic levels, including obligate herbivores, parasites (Vandelia) and the only known wood-eating fish species (Panaque). The sucker-shaped mouth and spoon-shaped teeth morphologies of loricariids allows many species to forage on algae and cling to substrate surfaces, and astroblepids even have the ability to climb waterfalls. The great diversity of loricarioid fishes provides abundant materials for the study of fundamental questions in evolution and ecology: What intrinsic organismal and external environmental factors promoted or restricted diversification within loricarioid clades? Why do some clades have such high species richness (as Loricariidae with 870 species) whereas other clades have such low diversity (as Nematogenyidae with 1 species, or Scoloplacidae with 6 species)? How can a dozen or more species from a single subfamily, all with seemingly equivalent ecological requirements in terms of habitat and food resources, coexist sympatrically within a single river system? Therefore, we propose to combine the intellectual and genetic resources of researchers in the US and in Brazil to reconstruct the phylogeny of Loricarioidea, assessing the most species-dense taxon sampling of these groups to date to study the diversification dynamics and understand the distributions of species and ecosystems in light of Earth history processes that shape landscape evolution. | |
| News published in Agência FAPESP Newsletter about the scholarship: | |
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