Meeting Abstract

P1-138   -   Interspecies and Individual Variation in Sculpin Ventilation Pouncy, JA*; Handy, S; Farina, SC; North Carolina A&T, Greensboro, North Carolina; Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona; Howard University, Washington DC japouncy@aggies.ncat.edu

Sculpins (Cottoidea) are primarily benthic fishes with vast diversity in ecology, behavior, and morphology. Given that sculpins are so diverse, we expect that their ventilation may vary among species. We compared the dominance of the buccal pump relative to the gill chamber pump in a multispecies study of sculpins. Because most sculpins are benthic, we predicted that they would primarily use gill chambers as the dominant pump. We compared the amount of pressure generated by each pump during each phase of the ventilatory cycle using surgically implanted pressure transducers. We then quantified this as a ratio of buccal to gill chamber pressure for 50 breaths per individual using a custom R script. We also looked at morphological correlates of the ratio among species using measurements from CT scans. We found convergent evolution in pump ratio across species. We also found that individuals of a species exhibited a range of buccal and gill chamber pumping, with the ability to switch between the two behaviors. We found no morphological correlates with pump dominance, suggesting that fishes can exhibit dominance towards gill chamber pumping or buccal pumping, regardless of ecology or morphology, due to behavioral variation in the usage of the pumps.