The energetic cost of vision and the evolution of eyeless Mexican cavefish
Damian Moran*, Rowan Softley and Eric J. Warrant
- Author Affiliations
Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund 22362, Sweden.
↵†Corresponding author.
E-mail: damian.moran@plantandfood.co.nz
↵* Present address: Plant and Food Research, Seafood Technologies Group, Nelson 7040, New Zealand.
Science Advances 11 Sep 2015:
Vol. 1, no. 8, e1500363
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500363
Credit/Crédito: Damian Moran
Abstract
One hypothesis for the reduction of vision in cave animals, such as the eyeless Mexican cavefish, is the high energetic cost of neural tissue and low food availability in subterranean habitats. However, data on relative brain and eye mass in this species or on any measure of the energetic cost of neural tissue are not available, making it difficult to evaluate the “expensive tissue hypothesis.” We show that the eyes and optic tectum represent significant metabolic costs in the eyed phenotype. The cost of vision was calculated to be 15% of resting metabolism for a 1-g fish, decreasing to 5% in an 8.5-g fish as relative eye and brain size declined during growth. Our results demonstrate that the loss of the visual system in the cave phenotype substantially lowered the amount of energy expended on expensive neural tissue during diversification into subterranean rivers, in particular for juvenile fish.
Keywords Biology Brain Evolution Eye Evolution Physiological Energetics Cave Subterranean
Copyright © 2015, The Authors
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