Meeting Abstract

P3-124   -   Why the long fins? The effects of fin morphology on the tail-flip jump Reed, MR*; Ruiz, A; Minicozzi, M; Minnesota State University, Mankato makenzie.reed@mnsu.edu

Fishes are generally considered to be fully aquatic, but some voluntarily strand themselves on land to escape poor water conditions, predators, or to exploit terrestrial niches. On land, many fishes move around using a tail-flip jump without apparent morphological specialization. We aimed to understand how small changes in morphology can affect the ability of a fish to perform a tail-flip jump. Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are an excellent model to investigate this because these fish move around on land with a tail-flip jump and many varieties have been bred in the pet trade. In this experiment, we utilized wild-type zebrafish and longfin zebrafish to see if the longer fin rays affect the fish’s ability to move around on land. We hypothesized that the longfin zebrafish would jump a shorter distance and can sustain jumping for less of a duration than the wild-type zebrafish because the longer fin rays increase the amount of surface area and cohesion between the fish and the substrate. Individuals of each strain were placed in an arena composed of a hard, rough surface covered with a damp substrate and were filmed performing a tail-flip jump at 600hz. Each fish was jumped multiple times and the best jump from each fish was used for kinematic analysis. Each fish was also placed in a three-foot plastic wading pool and voluntarily jumped for three minutes or were elicited to jump continuously until exhaustion. Individuals were euthanized, weighed, and photographed to measure the area of the caudal, median, and paired fins. Despite differences in the size of the fins, there were no differences in any of the jumping performance measures considered here. These findings imply that fin ray morphology may not have a large impact on jumping performance or that the differences between these two strains are not great enough for an observable effect on jumping performance.