Lake Malawi in eastern Africa harbors > 500 endemic species of cichlid fishes, all of which are believed to have emerged from a single founding population in the past 2 Myr. Molecular characterization of differences among the species could provide important information about the nature of speciation in the period of adaptive radiation. Because of the close relationship, however, molecular varia...

The distinct behaviours of animals and the varied habitats in which animals live place different requirements on their visual systems. A trade-off exists between resolution and sensitivity, with these properties varying across the retina. Spectral sensitivity, which affects both achromatic and chromatic (colour) vision, also varies across the retina, though the function of this inhomogeneity is...

East African cichlid fishes have evolved a stunning array of oral jaw morphologies. To better understand the adaptive evolution of this trait, we performed a morphological analysis of the jaws of two closely related species from Lake Malawi that have very different modes of feeding. Labeotropheus fuelleborni forages along the substrate with a "biting" mode of feeding, while Metriaclima zebra fe...

Background: There is much evidence indicating that natural substances from edible and medicinal plants possess powerful antioxidant and hepatoprotective activities. The objective of the present study was to investigate the potential hepatoprotective effect of silymarin in fish exposed to malathion. Methods: Zebra cichlid fish were allocated into five groups of which one group received norma...

Recent studies have suggested that size homoplasy is a prevalent feature of microsatellites and is expected to increase with time of divergence among populations and taxa. In this study, we performed sequence analysis of alleles from a complex microsatellite locus (Pzeb4, initially isolated from Pseudotropheus (Maylandia) zebra) from 1 midwater-feeding and 10 rock-dwelling cichlid fish species ...

Timing divergence events allow us to infer the conditions under which biodiversity has evolved and gain important insights into the mechanisms driving evolution. Cichlid fishes are a model system for studying speciation and adaptive radiation, yet, we have lacked reliable timescales for their evolution. Phylogenetic reconstructions are consistent with cichlid origins prior to Gondwanan landmass...

3 1. ABSTRACT Hybridization is believed to be an important mechanism for genetic diversity and speciation in many groups of organisms. One of the most important evolutionary signatures of hybridization is low phylogenetic resolution in rapidly evolving and closely related species. However, low phylogenetic resolution may also be caused by randomly-sorting ancestral alleles. The cichlid fishes o...

Cichlid fishes are a key model system in the study of adaptive radiation, speciation and evolutionary developmental biology. More than 1600 cichlid species inhabit freshwater and marginal marine environments across several southern landmasses. This distributional pattern, combined with parallels between cichlid phylogeny and sequences of Mesozoic continental rifting, has led to the widely accep...