This is just the first effort of our foray into cichlid behaviour and genetics! If you are interested in working on the evolution, genomics, and neurobiology of sleep and chronobiology @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social in beautiful Toronto, please reach out! shafer-lab.netlify.app

This is just the first effort of our foray into cichlid behaviour and genetics! If you are interested in working on the evolution, genomics, and neurobiology of sleep and chronobiology @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social in beautiful Toronto, please reach out! shafer-lab.netlify.app

Thanks to all my coauthors, including my first two grad students in Toronto, Amelia & Ayasha; thanks to @schierlab.bsky.social and Walter Salzburger as always for everything; and many huge thanks to @annika-nichols.bsky.social, who is my co-first-author and forever friend and colleague!!

Finally, we took advantage of extensive genomic data already generated by the Salzburger group to link activity and sleep phenotypes to genomic loci - intriguingly, they were not enriched for clock genes as hypothesised, but synaptic genes, and genes associated with neurological diseases in humans!

We hypothesise that these activity patterns represent a novel axis upon which these species diversified, leading to multiple temporal versions of each eco-morphological niche, and facilitating their rapid adaptive diversification!

Some, like the algivorous O. boops, sleep 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝟮 𝗵𝗿𝘀 𝗮 𝗱𝗮𝘆, whereas others, like the mud hole dwelling L. signatus, 𝘀𝗹𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝘂𝗽 𝘁𝗼 𝟭𝟱 𝗵𝗿𝘀 𝗮 𝗱𝗮𝘆!

(above video) we tracked hundreds of individual fish in the lab across 6 days and 6 nights from 60 species of cichlids from Lake Tanganyika - and discovered that they exhibit all known activity patterns (diurnal, nocturnal, crepuscular, and cathemeral)...