Summary Fishes are wonderfully diverse. This variety is a result of the ability of ray-finned fishes to adapt to a wide range of environments, and has made them more specious than the rest of vertebrates combined. With such diversity it is easy to dismiss comparisons between distantly related fishes in efforts to understand the biology of a particular fish species. However, shared ancestry and the conservation of developmental mechanisms, morphological features and physiology provide the ability to use comparative analyses between different organisms to understand mechanisms of development and physiology. The use of species that are amenable to experimental investigation provides tools to approach questions that would not be feasible in other ‘non-model’ organisms. For example, the use of small teleost fishes such as zebrafish and medaka has been powerful for analysis of gene function and mechanisms of disease in humans, including skeletal diseases. However, use of these fish to aid in understanding variation and disease in other fishes has been largely unexplored. This is especially evident in aquaculture research. Here we highlight the utility of these small laboratory fishes to study genetic and developmental factors that underlie skeletal malformations that occur under farming conditions. We highlight several areas in which model species can serve as a resource for identifying the causes of variation in economically important fish species as well as to assess strategies to alleviate the expression of the variant phenotypes in farmed fish. We focus on genetic causes of skeletal deformities in the zebrafish and medaka that closely resemble phenotypes observed both in farmed as well as natural populations of fishes.
Summary This review addresses the use of comparative studies of development to help understand the mechanisms underlying the evolution of morphological and physiological diversity. Mutation analysis in experimental model organisms is at the core of our understanding of how development works, and these findings have proven important in the identification and functional support of genetic variations associated with character change in natural populations. However, it has been argued that the essential and pleiotropic effect of many developmentally important genes limits the utility of such mutational study of development toward understanding evolution. Here, I argue that an analysis of the genetic regulation of postembryonic development will refine such comparative analysis. By focusing on late developmental events, one limits the type of genes as well as the types of genetic and developmental changes that may underlie evolutionary change. This may refine the predictive value of such comparative analysis. In this review, I discuss the use of fish as experimental and natural models to address these questions. Fish have several established, experimental models for genetic analysis. Additionally, the morphological and genetic diversity among fish provides a wealth of new models in which to look at the genetic and developmental basis of character change. This broadening of comparative genetic analysis may resolve the bias against genetic ‘monsters’ and what they can tell us about evolutionary change.
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