Meeting Abstract
Known for their unique visual capabilities, stomatopods, commonly called mantis shrimp, have one of the most complex visual systems in the animal kingdom. The eyes of an individual stomatopod can contain up to 16 classes of photoreceptors; in contrast, human eyes contain 4. These photoreceptors contain proteins called opsins, light-sensitive proteins that mediate the conversion of a photon into an electrochemical signal. Different opsins are sensitive to different wavelengths of light, enabling stomatopods to see a wide range of wavelengths. Coronis scolopendra is a spearing lysiosquilloid, and the only stomatopod species that exhibits drastic sexual color dimorphism. Females are dark brown, while males are light tan. Based on this unusual coloration and complex visual system, we hypothesized that sexual dimorphism also plays a role in opsin expression in this species. Specifically, males and females require differently tuned opsins to recognize individuals of the same and opposite sex. To this end, we are comparing gene expression in male and female C. scolopendra eyes. Specimens were collected from St. Andrews Bay, FL. RNA was extracted from eyes of three males and three females, sequencing libraries were prepared for each individual, and sequencing was conducted using an Illumina HiSeq 4000 generating 85-110 million reads per sample. Sequences were assembled de novo using Trinity. The assembled sequences will be annotated and opsin expression will be compared between male and female transcriptomes. This will be the first study on a sexually dimorphic stomatopod examining sexual dimorphism at a molecular level.
