spacer gif spacer gif spacer gif spacer gif spacer gif
QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced]


spacer gif
     Home     Help     Feedback     Subscriptions     Archive     Search     Table of Contents    

First published online June 26, 2009
Journal of Experimental Biology 212, 2194-2203 (2009)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2009
doi: 10.1242/jeb.025478
This Article
Right arrow Figures Only
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Supplementary Material
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow reprints & permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Lettieri, L.
Right arrow Articles by Streelman, J. T.
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Lettieri, L.
Right arrow Articles by Streelman, J. T.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Cleaner gobies evolve advertising stripes of higher contrast

L. Lettieri1,*, K. L. Cheney2, C. H. Mazel3, D. Boothe1, N. J. Marshall4 and J. T. Streelman1

1 School of Biology and Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0230, USA
2 School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia
3 Physical Sciences, Inc., 20 New England Business Center, Andover, MA 01810, USA
4 Sensory Neurobiology Group, School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia

* Author for correspondence (e-mail: liliana{at}gatech.edu)

Accepted 27 April 2009

Elacatinus gobies of the Caribbean have undergone rapid speciation along ecological axes, and particular species from this genus act as `cleaners' that remove ectoparasites from larger coral reef fish, termed `clients'. Evolutionary shifts in habitat use, behavior and lateral body stripe colors differentiate cleaners from ancestral sponge-dwelling lineages. High-contrast stripe colors associated with cleaning behavior on coral reefs may have evolved as a signal of cleaning status. We asked whether cleaner gobies with blue stripes are more conspicuous than ancestral yellow- and green-stripe phenotypes to a diverse set of potential client visual systems in the tropical reef environment where cleaning stations are commonly observed. Using spectrophotometric measurements of cleaners with blue and yellow stripes and their F1 hybrid, we tested the contrast of each color stripe to both potential dichromatic and trichromatic reef fish visual systems, against typical coral and sponge microhabitat background colors. Blue stripes provide the highest average chromatic contrast across a range of possible microhabitat colors to the majority of fish visual systems tested. The contrast provided by yellow and hybrid green stripes are comparable across habitats to dichromatic visual systems. The green stripe is less contrasting than both blue and yellow to many potential trichromatic visual systems. We suggest that the evolution of blue stripes in Elacatinus gobies could be a result of natural selection for signals of high color contrast, driven by the sensory biases and visual systems of diverse reef fish clients.

Key words: specialization, mutualism, adaptive radiation, color, vision model


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?




© The Company of Biologists Ltd 2009