Meeting Abstract

127.8  Monday, Jan. 7  Assembling the Tree of Life with a special focus on the Freshwater Crayfish CRANDALL, K.A.; George Washington University kcrandall@gwu.edu

The US National Science Foundation has sponsored a Tree of Life program for the past 10 years, yet there appears to be no completely assembled tree. Recently, NSF funded a group of collaborators to assemble the Tree of Life. I will outline our team and our approach to assembling the tree of life. Furthermore, I will invite all of you to add branches and leaves to the tree to help flush it out to the best of our abilities. I will then take a look at this tree with respect to the decapod crustaceans and in particular the freshwater crayfishes – outlining the details of their phylogenetic relationships. The decapod relationships are the culmination of the last 6 years of effort of the Decapod Tree of Life group. We used a combination of Sanger and next-gen sequencing approaches to sample decapods from 90% of the 185 extant families resulting in the most comprehensive sampling to date. I demonstrate the implications for our phylogeny on taxonomic relationships, morphological evolution of key features, and timing of major diversification events. I will pay particular attention to the lobsters and then the freshwater crayfishes.