This is an old article, reposted from the original WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. I’m on holiday for the moment, but you can expect a few new pieces here and there (as well as ...

Sex-determining systems may evolve rapidly and contribute to lineage diversification. In fact, recent work has suggested an integral role of sex chromosome evolution in models of speciation. We use ...

Is evolution predictable? What are the mechanisms that allow different fish to respond to the same environmental challenge in slightly different ways? When the same jaw bones and muscles change to ...

Figure 1: Representative rock-dwelling cichlid species from Lake Malawi. Figure 2: The phenotypically derived species has higher endogenous levels of Wnt signalling during craniofacial development.

Periods of deep, clear water in Lake Malawi over the past 800,000 years coincide with bursts of species diversification, researchers show in a new report. Africa's Lake Malawi is home to hundreds of ...

Animals are remarkably diverse in their sleep and activity patterns due to foraging strategies, social behavior and their desire to avoid predators. With more than 3,000 types of cichlids, these ...

Phenotypic novelties are an important but poorly understood category of morphological diversity. They can provide insights into the origins of phenotypic variation, but we know relatively little about ...

Despite the dramatic difference between day and nightlife, how fish exploit different times of day has not been studied systematically. Scientists explored alterations in the circadian timing of ...