Visual gene expression reveals a cone to rod developmental progression in deep-sea fishes

Abstract

Deep-sea fishes show extraordinary visual adaptations to an environment where every photon of light that is captured might make the difference between life and death. While considerable effort has been made in understanding how adult deep-sea fishes see their world, relatively little is known about vision in earlier life stages. Similar to most marine species, larval deepsea fishes start their life in the well-lit epipelagic zone, where food is abundant and predation relatively low. In this study, we show major changes in visual gene expression between larval and adult deep-sea fishes from eight different orders (