Meeting Abstract
Parental behavior has evolved multiple times in animals. Although it is a costly reproductive strategy for the parents, it increases fitness through a higher survival rate in offspring. Cichlid fishes are an evolutionary model system since they have a high propensity for speciation and have undergone recent radiation. In cichlids, parental behavior has independently evolved multiple times. In Haplochromis burtoni, for example, females house their broods in buccal sacs in their mouths, which protects underdeveloped fry from predation and environmental pathogens. During mouthbrooding, the females voluntarily fast so they do not accidentally swallow their offspring. In this study, we sequenced transcriptomes from female H. burtoni whole brains at different timepoints throughout the reproductive cycle in order to discover candidate genes linked to these recently evolved mouthbrooding and fasting behaviors. We found a suite of genes that are differentially expressed between reproductive timepoints that are involved in oxygen transport, lipid metabolism, and other metabolic processes. Interestingly, genetic background of individuals was far more predictive of transcriptome profiles and may point to bottleneck effects and/or domestication pressures having an outsized influence on gene expression in the brain.
