EDITOR'S CHOICE IN EVOLUTION
J.S.S. Denton, “Diversification patterns of lanternfishes reveal multiple rate shifts in a critical mesopelagic clade targeted for human exploitation,” Curr Biol, 28:933–40, 2018.
Commercial fishing has depleted oceanic stocks at shallow depths, and while companies could turn to catching fish from deeper in the sea, researchers haven’t begun to understand how fish populations in these zones would respond to commercial fishing pressure. John Denton, an evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, decided to look for answers to this question in these fishes’ evolutionary past.
Denton investigated the evolutionary roots of a clade known as lanternfish (family Myctophidae), which are plentiful at zones more than 200 meters below the surface. He first needed an evolutionary tree that was temporally precise and included data on a relatively large number of species. “There weren’t any trees that satisfied both conditions,” says Denton. ...
