Meeting Abstract

107.2  Sunday, Jan. 6  A phylogenomic approach to the evolution of the coral reef fish fauna VENZON, M.*; ALFARO, M.E.; Univ. of California, Los Angeles; Univ. of California, Los Angeles mvenzon@ucla.edu

Coral reefs, while only making up a mere 1% of the oceans’ area, are home to over a third of all the marine fish species. The reef-associated fish fauna is polyphyletic. Approximately 160 out of 450 families of ray-finned fishes include coral reef associated species. Nearly all of the major reef fish families fall within Percomorpha, a group comprising ~16,000 species. Due to the poor phylogenetic resolution of the percomorph tree of life, major questions regarding the evolution of the reef fish fauna remain unanswered. For example, the number of transitions to reef habitats, the timing of radiations of reef families, and the influence of geo-historical events such as changing sea levels and temperatures on the reef fish fauna are poorly understood. To begin to address the evolution of the percomorph reef fish fauna, we sampled 10 major reef-associated families as well as other non-percomorph lineages. We employed a new phylogenomic approach using targeted enrichment and massively parallel sequencing of >1300 ultraconserved DNA elements (UCEs). Our sampling strategy is designed to recover the crown ages of these 10 families to begin evaluating hypotheses regarding the timing of their colonizations and occurrence of concurrent radiations. Our long term goals include increasing the density of sampling within these groups as well as generating UCE-based phylogenies for 22 additional poorly studied reef clades.