Meeting Abstract
Through their long evolutionary history bats have diverged in their relative reliance on different senses; some species rely heavily on sight, others on hearing, and others on nasal and/or vomeronasal chemoreception. However, no species demonstrates extreme specializations in all three systems, suggesting that there may be trade-offs among them. The signatures of differential specialization on sensory systems should be evident in bat genomes, developmental processes, adult phenotypes. The ultimate goal of our work is to identify links between genomic, molecular developmental, and morphological aspects of variation in sensory systems in order to identify intrinsic drivers of ecological and taxonomic diversification. Our project focuses on noctilionoid bats because they encompass a wide variety of sensory specializations and there is a wealth of genetic, developmental, and morphological studies on which to build. Here we characterize skull shape in noctilionoid bats using micro-ct scanning and 3D geometric morphometrics (GM) to evaluate the relationship between skull shape and the size and distribution of soft tissues associated with vision, hearing, and chemoreception. We investigate associations between 3D GM data and soft tissue morphometry in order to explore whether and how skull shape reflects the structure, size, and distribution of soft tissues associated with vision, hearing, and chemoreception. Our quantitative assessments of the size, shape, and distribution of bony and soft tissue structures provide a platform for evaluating relationships among genotype, developmental mechanisms, and phenotype, and for testing the hypothesis that there has been competition among sensory systems.
