Extremophile Fishes: Ecology, Evolution, Conservation
Tobler Lab at the University of Missouri—St. Louis
We recently returned from a trip to Mexico centered around the annual Desert Fishes Council meeting in Cuatrociénegas. The meeting offered a great chance to reconnect with colleagues, hear new research on desert fish ecology, and discuss ongoing conservation challenges…
In late October, we conducted seasonal surveys of Pecos Gambusia at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico with the help of colleagues from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and ABQ BioPark. Over several days, we visited more...
In October, our team joined biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Missouri Department of Conservation, and the SEMO Grotto to continue annual monitoring of the endangered grotto sculpin in Perry County, MO. We surveyed several key caves, including...
This summer, our UMSL field team—Casey Ernest, Soren Johnson, and myself—joined forces with Lina Bichuette from the Universidade Federal de São Carlos and her student Brenda Almeida for an exciting expedition to Goiás, Brazil. Our shared mission was to explore...
We’re excited to share some of Libby’s dissertation research, just published in Molecular Ecology: Host-Microbiome Associations in Livebearing Fishes Adapted to Toxic Environments Rich in Hydrogen Sulfide. In this study, we explored how livebearing fishes from the Poecilia mexicana species...
Erik received a Vern Parish Fund Award from the American Livebearer Association for his proposal “Why had handedness evolved? A remarkable link between gonopodium asymmetry and behavioral laterality in livebearering fishes.” The award will support Erik’s research on Xenophallus umbratilis...
In 2007, we set out across Texas and northern Mexico to collect specimens of the Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa)—a sperm-dependent asexual fish—and its sexual host species. Our goal was to test whether the morphology of the asexuals co-varied with that...
Kara Ryan from the Kelley Lab at UC Santa Cruz led a collaborative effort to assemble six new high-quality, chromosome-level genomes for livebearing fishes in the genera Poecilia (P. mexicana and P. sulphuraria) and Gambusia (G. sexradiata and G. eurystoma),...