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. 2022 Oct 16;4(1):obac044.
doi: 10.1093/iob/obac044. eCollection 2022.

Bone Density Variation in Rattails (Macrouridae, Gadiformes): Buoyancy, Depth, Body Size, and Feeding

Affiliations

Bone Density Variation in Rattails (Macrouridae, Gadiformes): Buoyancy, Depth, Body Size, and Feeding

Rene P Martin et al. Integr Org Biol. .

Abstract

Extreme abiotic factors in deep-sea environments, such as near-freezing temperatures, low light, and high hydrostatic pressure, drive the evolution of adaptations that allow organisms to survive under these conditions. Pelagic and benthopelagic fishes that have invaded the deep sea face physiological challenges from increased compression of gasses at depth, which limits the use of gas cavities as a buoyancy aid. One adaptation observed in deep-sea fishes to increase buoyancy is a decrease of high-density tissues. In this study, we analyze mineralization of high-density skeletal tissue in rattails (family Macrouridae), a group of widespread benthopelagic fishes that occur from surface waters to greater than 7000 m depth. We test the hypothesis that rattail species decrease bone density with increasing habitat depth as an adaptation to maintaining buoyancy while living under high hydrostatic pressures. We performed micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scans on 15 species and 20 specimens of rattails and included two standards of known hydroxyapatite concentration (phantoms) to approximate voxel brightness to bone density. Bone density was compared across four bones (eleventh vertebra, lower jaw, pelvic girdle, and first dorsal-fin pterygiophore). On average, the lower jaw was significantly denser than the other bones. We found no correlation between bone density and depth or between bone density and phylogenetic relationships. Instead, we observed that bone density increases with increasing specimen length within and between species. This study adds to the growing body of work that suggests bone density can increase with growth in fishes, and that bone density does not vary in a straightforward way with depth.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Depth ranges of macrourid fishes and a closely related merluccid used in this study. Ranges are described from the following studies: Cohen et al. (1990), Iwamoto and Sazonov (1994), Iwamoto and Schneider (1995), Hoff et al. (2015), and Linley et al. (2016), Cruz-Acevedo and Aguirre-Villaseñor (2020).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Scan of Coryphaenoides leptolepis (SIO 91-152) with the four assessed bones highlighted: green) lower jaw; orange) first pterygiophore; purple) pelvic girdle; turquoise) 11th vertebra. Scale bar represents 10 mm.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Micro-CT scans of the macrourid specimens used to examine bone density in this study, ordered alphabetically by genus and species. Images standardized to show 10% – 90% calcium hydroxyapatite for use in qualitatively comparing variation in bone density. Scale bars represent 10 mm.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
(A) Bone density variation of the lower jaw, pelvic girdle, first pterygiophore, and 11th vertebrae across 20 specimens of rattails. Comparison of average bone density with a specimen's (B) pre-anal fin length, (C) maximum depth, (D) depth at capture, and (E) years since collection.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
(A) Maximum-likelihood phylogeny of rattail taxa used in this study with available sanger sequence data on Genbank. Scale bar represents the number of substitutions per site and bootstrap support values shown at nodes. (B) Ancestral character-state reconstruction of lower jaw bone density mapped along the branches of the phylogeny. Color map corresponds to percent hydroxyapatite.

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